


Day One

by Lapsed Pacifist (Tozette), Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Self-Insert, Silly, contains mentions of gender dysphoria
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Lapsed%20Pacifist, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Last I knew I was twenty three, driving away from my university graduation with my parents and sister and being mercilessly teased about how, with my shiny new literature degree, I was now fully qualified to work at a fast food chain. </p><p>When I next woke up, a tall woman in a lab coat was flashing a light into my eyes and calling me Sasuke.</p><p>[Self Insert, silliness. Moving this one over from FF Net.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I recently shifted this story from FFnet to AO3 for Reasons.
> 
> This story contains nonsense, alternate universe stuff here and there, silliness, etc., It's got a self-insert main character who lands herself in the body of one of the main characters, who experiences a number of awkward obstacles with the shinobi lifestyle, etc. I also have no idea regarding any future relationships for the character/s at this point so I'm gonna leave it loose and hope for the best.

I don't know how this happened. I can tell you about the events, but the why and the how -- those you're gonna have to work out on your own. Or not.

It started like this: there was a car crash. Our car was crushed by a semitrailer. My parents died. My sister died.

I survived, or, well - most of me survived, for a little while - and the last thing I remember was listening to the doctors at the ER talk about "hypovolemic shock" and something about trauma and - well, it didn't sound good. I was swiftly hooked up to a million softly-beeping machines and loaded up with fluids and -

I wasn't sure if I was dying or not, but I was on a lot of drugs and the doctors were a little oblique about it, and I was in such a state of shock that I barely remembered what they'd told me anyway.

I still have no idea what happened to me.

Last I knew I was twenty-three, driving away from my university graduation with my parents and my sister and being mercilessly teased about how, with my shiny new literature degree, I was now fully qualified to work at a fast-food chain.

When I next woke up, a tall woman in a lab coat was flashing a light into my eyes and calling me Sasuke.

Look, I've read some of Naruto - not all of it, for god's sakes, do you know how long that thing is? - but it definitely wasn't my first thought. Sarutobi Sasuke is one of the most famous fictional ninja ever, and all I could think was that she was talking about one of the Sanada Ten Braves.

It was strange, though, I didn't feel... well, I didn't feel sick, just kind of exhausted and headachey.

"I'm afraid what ever technique Itachi-ta - Uchiha Itachi," the doctor corrected herself, looking a little disturbed even as she kept checking my vitals, "What ever technique was used on you has done some damage, Sasuke-kun," she informed me.

I blinked once, slowly.

She paused.

"Sasuke-kun, I will need some confirmation that you understand what I'm saying," said the doctor hesitantly.

Did I understand the words? Sure. Did I understand the meaning? Not... so much. "I do," I said. "Where am I?"

It was definitely not the hospital room I'd fallen asleep in.

She looked briefly relieved. "Konoha General Hospital. You've been unconscious for some time, Sasuke-kun. How much do you remember?"

Konoha General. What?

"I..." I thought hard. The crash came to me then: the yowl of tortured metal, screams and breaking glass, heat and pressure. It had been so  _loud_.

And everybody except me had been declared dead at the scene. "Oh," I said softly. "My family's -" I stopped.

I breathed.

"Yes. You're more or less up to date, then," said the doctor, whose bedside manner needed some work. "Now, with regard to the technique used on you," she went on, "I've never seen anything like it. There's been a serious alteration in your brain patterns, but it doesn't seem to have affected its normal functioning. Your chakra, however..."

There was a pause. "Chakra is made of mixed physical and mental energies," she said slowly, "and unfortunately it seems that yours are now... misaligned, a little. What the effect of that might be, we can't say for certain, but it could definitely have an impact on your futu- Sasuke-kun, are you listening to me?"

I wasn't, not really. I heard her, but honestly I was busy puzzling over what the hell kind of hospital seriously talked about chakra like it was a real thing. Alternative medicine was an alternative to medicine, and hospitals din't usually have traffic with that sort of stuff. A lot of this conversation seemed to indicate that I'd been kidnapped by rabid anime nerds, but it seemed a little too well organised.

Also, who on earth would bother?

I got out of the bed and nearly fell over because the floor was much, much farther away than I expected. I'm... you know, I'm only about five foot six, but suddenly, inexplicably, I was...

I wobbled on my bare feet.

My tiny, bare, prepubescent feet.

"Sasuke-kun?" the doctor repeated warily.

"I want to see outside," I said, and even I could hear how strained I sounded.

There was an uncertain pause, and then the doctor sighed and came around to me. "All right," she said patiently, and helped me over to the window.

Outside, the birds were singing and the air was surprisingly fresh - it didn't taste like city air, that was for sure. The buildings I could see were worn but very sturdy, and all had roofs of scuffed tile, and most of them were connected by a series of power lines that seemed to cross and hang with no real purpose or direction.

It was a walled city, nestled in the shadow of a mountain. And... I could see Hashirama's nose looming to one side of the window.

My 'rabid anime nerds' theory was getting thinner and thinner by the second. I looked down at my hands on the window sill.

So... the Naruto universe, huh. I was suddenly fiercely annoyed at myself for reading _A Room of One's Own_ instead of more fun, bullshit manga.

Seriously, what the hell was the point of Virginia Woolf in a stylised fuedal Japan with anachronistic technology and magic using ninja? _Ninja are magic, your argument is invalid._

Christ.

I looked down. My hands were tiny. Sasuke's hands were tiny.

I was Sasuke.

A shadow leapt from rooftop to rooftop out in the village. I watched it until it dropped away between buildings.

Ninja.

 _Seriously_.

"Sasuke-kun?"

"I'm fine," I said quickly.

"That's what I was trying to tell you," the doctor said, resting one hand one my shoulder. "You're not quite fine. Your mental energy has grown exponentially and far, far exceeded your physical energy, which... it's very rare, Sasuke-kun, we haven't documented it well. You may struggle with some kinds of chakra manipulation."

I nodded. "I understand," I said.

The doctor looked like she was expecting a different reaction, but... really, what could I say? I felt like screaming at her - I'm lost! I'm stuck! What the hell am I doing here! - but she wanted to talk about chakra manipulation. Even Sasuke, right now, surely - surely he'd be more focused on the massacre, and -

My brain was awhirl with confusion.

I rubbed my wrists uncertainly. They were so little.

I struggled to think of the physical feats Uchiha Sasuke had performed in the manga. Could he really...?

I rubbed my forehead, feeling confused and anxious.

Some of this must have communicated itself to the doctor.

"Come back to bed now," the doctor ordered, pulling me away from the window and its captivating, terrifying view. "We want to keep you for observation for a little while, but you should be able to go home in a day or so."

I went obediently. It was probably a good thing I wasn't Sasuke, because my doctor evidently had all the empathy of a pile driver. Sasuke - and I - had little in the way of a home to return to, since everybody either of us loved was  _dead_.

I wasn't very good at understanding all this.

If anything, the nurses seemed relieved when, a few hours later, I started crying and couldn't seem to stop.

It wasn't me mourning my own parents and sister, even. I was just lost, and alone, and terribly afraid. But the nurses saw a boy coming out of a massacre able to think about it clearly enough to cry.

Stupid girl, I thought. Who's that going to help?

* * *

I was there for another day.

A quartet of clucking lady nurses - or, as I determined from listening to them, recently qualified assistant nurses - came by to coo at me.

"Poor thing," murmured one of them.

"It's an absolute tragedy," said another, peering at me from the doorway and clicking her tongue. "And Itachi-taichou always seemed so quiet and respectful!"

They were really rude. I took a deep breath. Did they think they were being quiet? They were not being quiet.

I had no idea what to do - did I tell them off? Did I ask them to come into the room properly? Talk to them? Ask them to leave? - so I just stared at my callused little hands and pretended I couldn't see the onlookers.

It was ten minutes - ten objectively short but subjectively  _interminable_  minutes - before an even, amused male voice sounded over the top of them, "Don't you have actual work to do?"

There was a startled yelp and a chorus of responses ranging from apology to complaint, and then the mass exodus of the group from the corridor. Once they'd left, I could see a ninja in the doorway. He was fit, shorter than the men I was used to but well-formed, and he had honey-brown hair and sharp eyes. There was a pleasant kind of angularity to his face.

I'd have found him attractive, except, oh yeah,  _I hadn't hit puberty yet._

Unless this body was only attracted to girls? I was used to being attracted to girls, but I'd miss men. Was sexuality even physical? Was it -- like, some kind of metal thing only? A mix of both? 

That was a weird thought.

...I was just going to avoid thinking about that one. At least until it became relevant. That was years away, hopefully. I was still trying to figure out the answer to the terrifying question: How Do I Penis? It was just... there. Flop.  _So weird_.

The ninja's wrist was strapped and bandaged for support, hinting at some kind of injury, and his stance made me wonder if he was favouring his leg or his ribs or something.

It took me a few seconds to recognise him as Shiranui Genma, mostly because he didn't have a senbon between his teeth. I wasn't sure if Sasuke was supposed to know him or not. After a moment, I stayed quiet. At least if I pretended not to recognise him I could blame it on trauma induced memory loss.

"Uchiha Sasuke?" he asked, even though he had to know who I was, which I suppose answered my question. We must be strangers.

It turned out he was there to escort Sasuke home - an off-roster jounin doing odd jobs for the Hokage until his wrist healed, apparently - and I ended up just getting dressed in the clothes he tossed onto the bed and following him.

He didn't say anything while we walked. A lot of the people outside on the street followed me with their eyes, and sometimes conversations stopped all together and resumed, faster and more hushed, after we'd passed. I'd have to have been an idiot not to notice.

The Uchiha district was like its own little village. Its own... empty... little village. I looked around. There was room for a few hundred, which seemed like... a lot.

A lot of dead people.

Itachi was one seriously messed up kid.

"Is..." my voice was a bit rusty. I hadn't spoken much in the past two days. "Is this all mine, now?"

Genma scratched his chin. "More or less," he said vaguely. "There's probably a trust or something, I don't know the details."

I nodded. A trust. It made sense, but I'd need to investigate it.

Genma paused outside the steps of one of the larger houses.

It looked like this was the clan head's house. It was very traditional, very minimalist and elegant. There was a pond, with little rocks situated around it in a way that probably had some meaning I was missing. I could almost sense the presence of rice paper divides and tatami mats beyond the walls.

At least the traditional architecture would let a lot of light in.

"You don't have to stay here, you know," Genma said slowly. "If you're worried. But there's almost no chance of Itachi getting back into Konoha, so..."

I blinked in surprise, and then shook my head. That was the last thing I was worried about, although I probably should have considered pretending I was. Of course Itachi wasn't coming back to Konoha.

"No," I said, "it's fine."

I don't know what he was thinking, watching me with my eyes fixed on the house. I probably looked horribly lost.

Because I  _was_ , dammit.

"If you're sure." Genma hesitated for a second, but then he turned and walked away.

I stayed where I was for a few long minutes, trying to process.

Over the past days, I'd decided that I had probably died, back in my world. I didn't know much about medicine, but words, _them_ I understood. Now that I could think clearly, I could figure out what those doctors had been talking about. ...and I had a sneaking suspicion that 'hypovolemic shock' had really meant I'd been dying of blood loss.

So. Probably dead, which meant no going back.

I scratched my head.

The house loomed.

"Okay," I muttered to myself.

Sasuke's house had been left more or less as Itachi had left it. Somebody had gone and removed all the bodies, and most of the blood had been scrubbed clean, but there was still furniture overturned and walls with slashes in them from somebody's sword. There was broken crockery in one room.

The bedrooms were ...hard. Harder, somehow, for how little the violence had reached them.

They looked undisturbed, waiting for their owners to return and bed down for the night.

Itachi had made his bed before he'd left, I noticed.

I stared at it for a while.

Slowly, I crept into his room. The bedding was clean. Everything was put away in its place. Itachi at thirteen was more organised and better-kempt than I was at twenty three, apparently.

Looking at the closet, I didn't think he'd taken much with him. There was almost no personality to the room, really. The two books on his shelf were Konoha codes of practice and a history of the noble Uchiha clan, both of which I suspected had been picked for him, not by him.

It was very... clean.

Sasuke's room disturbed me. He was a very young boy, although judging from the materials in his room he was probably clever for his age.

I couldn't stay in here. Staying here would mean immersing myself in the person I'd replaced. I swallowed. What was left? The master bedroom? No. God, no.

Eventually I decided on Itachi's room.

I took the stuff I'd need from Sasuke's room - books, notes, homework, clothes, blunted practice weapons - and I moved them into Itachi's. Then I closed up Sasuke's room and left it.

It was very clean in Itachi's room, but... clean was good.

Clean was okay.

With that thought in mind, I turned my attention to the rest of the house. Some things needed to be cleaned up and thrown away, and others needed to be fixed. Food in the refrigerator desperately needed to be thrown out, and it occurred to me that I should probably go through the other houses in the compound and at the very least dispose of the rotting food, which would almost certainly attract vermin if I left it too long.

I didn't relish the thought of clearing it all out, though.

But, still, somebody had to do it.

And given that everybody else was dead, I supposed that somebody was likely to be me.

I wondered if Sasuke would have. He wasn't very old - I woudn't have had the discipline at his age. I'd have curled up in bed and ignored the issue until it went away.

I stared at nothing for a while. 

Oh, well.

Cleaning ensued.

This was also a relatively good way to familiarise myself with the clan compound. Since I was stuck being Sasuke, I was going to need to know what Sasuke knew - or at least not make it obvious what I'd forgotten. The trauma of losing his family could account for a lot of personality changes, but I wasn't sure if it would work to account for semantic memory loss...It was best I try, anyway.

It was strange. I always thought that Sasuke seemed terribly popular in the manga, but nobody came to visit me. It was just me and the empty Uchiha compound.

On my fourth morning in Konoha I got up with the sun and went running. Despite the odd sandal-shoes and the strange environment, it felt blessedly normal. This, at least, was something familiar to me.

Of course, I expected to jog for about five kilometers, until I was sweating and shaking and I couldn't think anymore, and then stumble gasping through a cool down walk back to my house. That didn't quite turn out as I'd expected.

Uchiha Sasuke could do this  _literally for hours._

I wished I had an MP3 player, because apparently I could have just rolled out of bed and run a marathon without even feeling it the next day. Not only that, but I was  _fast_. That marathon? I was pretty sure this body could do it in two and a half hours.

And, good god, Sasuke had been  _unconscious_  for a few weeks, thanks to Itachi's torturous genjutsu.

I gave it an hour and sailed back to the house at an easy jog. My body's physical conditioning was ridiculous. I wondered if all ninja kids were like this?

And adult ninja, at the peak of their training... they must be  _better_.

To be able to move tirelessly, to rely so completely on your body - if I'd been having second thoughts about continuing with Sasuke's career choice, I wasn't anymore.

Yeah, I  _totally_  wanted to be a ninja.


	2. Chapter 2

Going to the academy - or, well, from the academy's perspective, returning to the academy -was... awkward.

In the few days I took off following the murder of Sasuke's family, I went over his notes. He was a blessedly good student, and some of it was mathematics or common knowledge that I didn't need to learn. Other stuff was history, and there was a fair bit of tactical knowledge, exercises on mission planning and the like. It didn't seem terribly difficult, but Sasuke was meticulous for his age.

I would have to be, too.

I got there in time for all of the other kids' parents to look at me and make pitying expressions, following which several of them pulled their children close to murmur into their ears. Then the children started looking at me with wide eyes and trembling lips.

I felt extremely uncomfortable, and very, very guilty.

Just because I hadn't planned it and couldn't have helped it didn't mean I wasn't an enormous fake. I didn't enjoy the sympathy, but even worse, I didn't deserve it.

I saw some familiar faces, recognisable even though manga pages really didn't do enough justice to the character of a person's features. Yamanaka Inoichi was easily recognisable, at least, because his hair went on practically forever. Despite the feminine style, nobody would be mistaking his sex: he was broad-shouldered and hard faced, and even though he had to be at least mid-thirties and, as far as I knew, worked mostly inside the village, there were parts of him that actually rippled. They sure hadn't captured  _that_  in the manga.

This morning he must have drawn the short straw, because he was trailing a chattering Ino and a munching Chouji, and had Shikamaru slumped over one shoulder.

As I watched, he set the lanky kid down and poked him until he woke up. "Honestly," he muttered, spinning Shikamaru by the shoulders and setting him marching toward the school building. He gave him a little shove, and Shikamaru gave him a resentful look, which went completely ignored.

Ino followed, already complaining about how lazy her friend was. "Bye, Daddy!" she called out over her shoulder, waving to him with a bright smile.

What I'd initially thought was a hard and unyielding face completely transformed under the devastating effect of his daughter's smile. He melted. It wiped a decade off him. "Bye, Ino-chwaaan~♥!" he called back, sounding just as cheerful as his young daughter.

Now  _that_  was cute.

"Uchiha-kun, don't you have class?" he added, just loudly enough to carry to me, which was when I realised he knew I'd been watching him all along.

Whoops. I blinked.

"I do," I agreed, but I still hesitated.

I didn't want to stay out here with him, but I didn't really want to go in and have people staring at me either. What would Sasuke have done? Acted indifferent, I suppose. I looked up at the sign for "fire" over the doorway of the academy.

Inoichi heaved a sigh and approached, making an effort to make a little noise as he moved. I kept expecting him to stop, but he kept coming closer, and for a second I thought he might reach out and touch me.

It wasn't that I was crazy or traumatised or anything just... well, I was used to being a young woman, and Inoichi was a lot bigger than me, and, well, most women know what it's like to be grabbed or touched unexpectedly. It's not fun. It's creepy as all fuck.

I stepped away, but between my anxiety and Sasuke's muscle memory, it turned out less like a step and more like a quick dodge.

Inoichi froze at the same time as I did, although with more wariness than surprise.

Me? I was surprised. Sometimes I hated this new body as much as I loved it.

My shock must have been evident, because Inoichi relaxed. "Been a rough week?" he asked carefully, shoving his hands in his pockets.

I was absolutely certain nobody had had this conversation with Sasuke. He would have turned his nose up and walked off, determined to find his own way. I wasn't that strong. ...or that stubborn.

Watching Inoichi with his daughter reminded me of how my family, my real family, was dead. How I was dead. And also how the whole Uchiha clan was dead.

I shifted uncomfortably. I wanted that support. Badly. But at the same time, I - well, I couldn't tell anybody about anything real, anyway. I...

I was so fucking confused. "Rough," I said. Then, "yeah."

It certainly had been that.

He nodded. "You might find it gets easier, the more you do normal things," he suggested cautiously.

I looked at him.

"We're all ninja, Uchiha-kun," he pointed out in a softer voice. "We've all lost people. Not in the same way, of course," he added with a little wince, "but..." he paused, eyes distant for a moment.

That, at least, was true. Inoichi was a war vet. If nothing else, he definitely knew about people dying. For a precious second I didn't feel so isolated. "Aa," I said after a moment. I still wasn't sure what Sasuke would say. I didn't even know what he'd been like when he was this young.

Maybe I should just stop worrying about what Sasuke would do. Right now I _was_ Sasuke, so I might as well act like myself. Any major personality changes could surely be attributed to the massacre...

"You should get to class," Inoichi told me in a more normal voice, interrupting my thoughts. "But, Uchiha-kun," he said after a pause, "remember there's plenty of names on the memorial stone, ne?"

There were. There was probably not a ninja alive who didn't know the pain of losing somebody. Naruto, maybe - but he had the experience of never having had somebody to begin with. That, surely, was even worse.

"I will," I said, nodding. Then I turned and followed the path Ino and Chouji had taken earlier. At least I knew they were all in my class.

Class was boring. Initially it seemed interesting because the information all formed a web with Sasuke's meticulous notes, and I felt like I learned a lot about the culture just listening to the way we were taught. But after that... well, there was a lot of theoretical stuff I already knew.

I was always terrible at the more advanced mathematics we had to do in school - calculus, oh my god, no, just _no_ \- but ninja were required to do different kinds of calculations. Budgeting for a long term mission, measurements for astronavigation, percentages, rates of currency exchange - these were useful, practical things, and mostly they were the kind of mathematics I was much better at.

Then there were mission scenarios given by sensei, and exercises where we were split into groups to determine the best course of action. The first group I was assigned to contained a purple-haired girl called Ami, Shikamaru, and a kid with a spiky ponytail and a white shirt with black piping. He looked a little familiar, but I couldn't place him.

I let Ami and Ponytail Boy hash it out, watching the way they interacted. As far as I could tell, neither of them were very good at this task.

"Ne," said Ami after ten minutes of absolute chaos in the classroom in which all the children seemed determined to be heard over one another, "Sasuke-kun agrees with me, don't you?"

I blinked.  _Sasuke-kun_? Surely it hadn't started already? These girls were  _eight_!

Shikamaru rolled his face so his cheek was resting on his forearm. One sloe eye was visible, and it was regarding me.

"Not really," I said after a second. She looked  _crushed_.

"But Hideo's idea is  _stupid_ ," she protested.

I decided I wasn't going to comment on that, because Hideo's idea  _was_  stupid, in the overzealous way the ideas of children are often wont to be. I shrugged.

"What's your plan?" Shikamaru said finally, looking at me.

That was annoying, because I was pretty sure whatever I could come up with, Shikamaru could do better. Still... I had  _some_  ideas. A degree in literature  _did_  tend to feature reading about warfare, since killing each other was basically the universal hobby of mankind.

I shrugged one shoulder. "Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west," I said. I was quoting, but they didn't know that.

Ami and Hideo looked confused, but Shikamaru grunted and closed his eyes again. "Go with that one," he said.

"That doesn't even make sense!" Ami growled. She scowled at him. Hideo scowled at me.

Shikamaru mumbled something about yelling and covered his head with his arms, which reminded me that he, too, was actually a small child.

"It means that we should distract them," I explained, "so they move their forces in one direction, and then attack from another direction completely. We get to pick where the fight starts, we attack where their defences are weaker, and we get to surprise them."

"It's a good strategy for new genin," Sensei said from over my shoulder, surprising me with his nearness. "Low risk fighting protects your team mates." I blinked up at him. "Good to know you're still our best student, Sasuke-kun," he said with a smile.

I glanced at Shikamaru, but he didn't look up, and Sensei continued walking among the screaming, bickering children. I thought Ami was going to flip out at me, but after a second she shrugged and wrote down the answer I'd given. Hideo glowered at me like I'd done something wrong. I ignored him because I was not, in fact, eight years old.

Somewhere across the room, Ino and Kiba had begun a screaming match. Shikamaru made a troubled noise and hunched further. "So noisy."

Privately, I agreed with him, but I liked to think I had enough self control not to bury my face in my arms and doze through class. I noticed that Shikamaru hadn't bothered to write anything down at all.

Ah, well.

When we were set free for lunch, I peered around the playground - which was, actually, a glorified training arena, where there were wooden stumps of different sizes and slalom poles and trees of the perfect height and shape for us to climb. There were two hills that didn't really look that natural, and which had odd-coloured markers discarded on top. Presumably they were for playing some kind of ninja variant of capture the flag, I decided.

The other children basically ignored the actual purpose of all this. Kiba was cackling wildly as he leapt from the top of one slalom pole to the next, preceeded by an excited Akamaru. Sakura - who was not in my class, but whose group took their break at the same time - was perched on top of one of the hills with Ino and a couple of the other girls. I wasn't sure what was going on there, but from the excited fluttering of Ino's hands, she was holding forth on some topic of great interest.

I hesitated. I wasn't really sure who to sit with. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to sit with anybody.

I was honest enough with myself to know that I rather desperately needed a friend. I was reeling from a combination of my family's deaths, my death, the jarring unfamiliarity of a new world, not actually knowing anyone -

Yeah, I needed a confidante. Or at least somebody to cling to for a while.

Unfortunately, I was probably a lot closer to the intellectual level of these kids' parents than the children themselves.

I settled between the sprawling roots of a tall tree and meticulously unpacked my lunch. I hadn't really had the opportunity to cook much, since I'd been too busy organising the absolute wreck that was my life, and so my lunch consisted of hard boiled eggs and chopped tomato.

"That doesn't look very nice," Chouji commented. He set himself down about three feet away, legs crossed, and retrieved a packet of chips from... I wasn't entirely sure, actually. A sealing scroll? Pocket universe? Bag of Holding? I just did not know.

I glanced at him. "It's not. I haven't had time," I said.

He held out his packet.

Chips. They did look tasty, but a sense of guilt rose like a wave within me and I shook my head. "I'm fine," I said.

He looked dubious.

"You don't want to play ninja?" I asked, nodding toward where Hideo had rounded up a couple of the other kids and was failing spectacularly to organise them in any way.

Chouji eyed them. "I don't think they'd let me," he said, much as though it didn't bother him in the slightest. "Besides," he added, "Shikamaru'd prefer to sit out." He nodded toward where the other boy was resting, just a tree or two away. His dark eyes were fixed on the clouds.

"Aa," I murmured, and bit into another egg.

It was...

Well, I could have at least remembered to salt it.

I didn't dislike Chouji, I just didn't know entirely what to say to him. I had no idea how well Sasuke knew him, or how he expected me to behave. I was naturally rather quiet and introverted, so it seemed like the best way to reconcile the problem was just to sit in silence with him.

"Hey, hey," said a loud voice, interrupting my reverie, and I looked up to find Kiba looming close. He'd gotten quite dirty in the ten or fifteen minutes we'd been outside. "Is it true your _whole family_  died?" he asked, wide-eyed.

I blinked. Distantly, I heard Shikamaru sigh.

Well, that was... blunt. Still, it was kind of good to have somebody actually say it, instead of just tiptoeing around the idea and leaving spaces rife with implications.

He was an eight year old kid, and as far as I knew, he wasn't going to become more tactful any time soon.

"Yes," I said, deciding not to take offence.

He looked at me like he hadn't really thought ahead far enough to envisage this answer. After a second he squinted at me. "Is that why you've been gone for so long?" he asked. "Did you get hurt too?"

"...Yes," I said again, which was probably not entirely honest, but it was a lot easier than explaining the craziness that was the Tsukuyomi.

He nodded like this was a very satisfying answer, and then ran off hollering something like a neurotic rabbit on steroids.

Kids, I thought in confusion.

"Kiba's weird," Chouji commented, chomping on another chip.

"You're _all_ weird," I muttered.

He shrugged.


	3. Chapter 3

There were physical activities after lunch, which was good because it allowed me to find out that, no, actually,  _not_  all ninja children were as fit and conditioned as I was in my new body.

The kids from civilian families certainly weren't, and some of the ninja clans' kids like Ino, Shikamaru and Chouji didn't seem that enthused about the exercise program. It was hard to tell with Ino and Shikamaru, though, because they didn't seem motivated to try very hard.

On the other hand, it looked like the children doing best were definitely the ones from well known ninja clans. It was no surprise that as soon as he was told to run, Kiba gave an enormous cheerful whoop and took off at a breakneck speed that only slowed a little over the afternoon. Akamaru, even tinier than I'd seen him in the manga, chased after him, dashed ahead, circled around - there was a lot of chatter and excited yipping, and Kiba never even seemed winded.

Hinata, too, was surprisingly swift and steady in the exercises - I'd always thought of Hinata as a shy, kind of weirdly ugly girl who was soft and pale and - well, the sort of person you'd describe as "a good trier," for wont of anything kinder to say. Uncharitable, but true. Obviously I was wrong.

Our program consisted of five laps around the academy's training area, followed by a series of physical exercises using our bodyweight, followed by a quick series of simple kata and then repeated. Again. And again. And again.

On the second lap of the second set of running around the training area, I found myself alongside Shino, who said nothing. If I concentrated, I thought I could almost hear the dull buzz of the insects under his skin. That was interesting.

He wasn't as excitable as Kiba or as determined as Hinata, but Shino moved at an even, measured pace that was easy to match, and he didn't talk. To be honest, quiet company was basically what I was craving after a week all alone in the sprawling, abandoned Uchiha estate. I wondered if it would seem weird to try to befriend him.

I decided, when we were on our seventh and last cycle through the exercises, that the clan kids almost certainly had some kind of genetic advantage. My new body definitely had it. My hand-eye coordination was perfect. My throwing skills were top-notch. My endurance was fantastic, my speed the highest in the class - even the kata we did flowed smoothly, muscle memory taking hold and singing through my limbs.

The Uchiha clan was really something, I supposed.

Of course, kata were more or less theoretical. They were physical movements, yes, but the violence wasn't there. Sparring was, er... not that great.

Oh, god, who am I kidding. Sparring was a _catastrophe._

I hesitated before every single offensive move. It didn't take long for Shino to wear me down and hand me my arse on a silver platter. Shino did not look nearly as surprised as Sensei.

By the end of the first month, my taijutsu ranking, previously the best in the class, had dropped significantly. Below Kiba. Way below Shino. It wans't entirely comforting to know that I was, on average, about as good as Chouij - although I suppose at least the Akimichi clan were taijutsu types. I was relying a lot on muscle memory, and that was strange and jarring, but even worse, apparently, was my mentality.

One morning, after a long and tiring spar with Kiba - who couldn't win, but who I couldn't put down, either - Sensei pulled me aside.

"You're being too hesitant to hurt people," he said bluntly. "It's... understandable," he hedged, "considering. But you have to train yourself out of it."

I rubbed my hands through my sweaty hair, making it stick up even worse. (This hair, seriously.) "How?"

"Practice," he said grimly. "Practice, practice,  _practice_."

So I practised. Maybe it wasn't a lot compared to people like Uzumaki-I'm-the-main-character-Naruto or Rock Lee, but I clocked about fourteen hours of taijutsu outside classes every week.

It helped, but less than you might think.

At that point, my schedule looked a little like this: I'd rise a little before the sun, stretch, go running, return home, stretch some more, and then practice my taijuttsu strikes against the wooden pillars in the empty Uchiha training grounds. The academy hours began at nine-thirty and went until four, five days a week. On those days I was usually sleepy by the time I returned home, and for the most part I dedicated my evenings to making sure I was fed and clean and that my homework was done.

On the days we had off, I usually extended my run. I'd started fit and swift and I was only getting better. I was running a marathon once a week, easily and without negative repercussions, despite my tiny prepubescent body.

Ninja were so cool.

(Sometimes, running through the village proper in the very early mornings, I was struck by how different things were, and a terrible wave of homesickness washed over me. Sometimes you just had to grit your teeth and wait for it to be over.)

Still, as hard as I tried to be a good ninja, there's a psychological component that people tended to overlook - at least, in this world, because virtually everybody had it. These people had been raised from birth to be perfectly willing to get hurt, willing to fling themselves into danger, willing to hurt other people.

I, on the other hand... I was used to trying to avoid conflict at all costs. It was hard to become good at close combat when you were trying to minimise damage to everyone involved, although I did become very good at dodging.

For me, it wasn't hard to work up enough aggression to damage the wood, but when I was faced with an actual person it was... hard not to balk. Because apparently I was a giant coward.

I was no Uchiha Sasuke, that was for sure.

It was a problem that never did really go away, even after years of working on it at the academy. And then, well, by the time our cohort was ten, the time I might have spent working on it was often taken up with working on the  _other_  major problem I encountered in the academy.

My ninjutsu fucking  _sucked_.

No, I mean it  _really_  sucked. That was not just a psychological problem, and I knew that Sasuke had been - well, a good all-rounder, actually, but mostly a ninjutsu fighter in the manga.

I certainly wasn't expecting it. The first time I tried to make a replacement was... sobering.

Mizuki-sensei was our primary teacher this year, which was all kinds of weird because I remembered him being a giant jerk in the manga and he wasn't, not really.

As long as nobody was discussing the Kyuubi, he was - well, no, he was messed up and bitter either way. But he genuinely seemed to enjoy teaching, and he was actually pretty all right, most of the time.

Funny how people are, isn't it?

"All right," he said, standing at the front of the classroom with a cheerful smile. "Today we're going to actually practice the first of our E-rank jutsu. I know you've all done the reading," he added, eyeing Kiba thoughtfully, "and we've discussed the process, so there shouldn't be any accidents. The worst I'm expecting is that it will fail completely for some of you - that's all right, too," he added, shrugging. "Some people take more practice than others, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Akimichi Chouji," he said then, calling Chouji down to try it out.

Not everybody was successful, although many of the children were. Hideo accidentally flung himself into the wall and had to be helped out of the cracked plaster amid much laughter, and Kiba's piece of wood set itself on fire for no readily apparent reason.

Still, it looked mostly fun, and I didn't feel like it would be a big problem when I tried it out. I remembered precisely the instructional text I'd read, and I was good at all of the chakra control exercises we'd done so far - uncommonly good, the teachers had said, because usually people with larger pools of chakra struggled a lot. I didn't remember Sasuke having particularly good chakra control in the manga, but I shrugged it off. Maybe it was partially a mental thing.

There were a few murmured giggles as I walked toward the front of the class, which made me uncomfortable, not least because I was so very much older than the girls to whom those giggles belonged. But, well, I couldn't stop them, so I did my best to ignore them.

Mizuki-sensei gave me an encouraging smile and nodded. I drew on my chakra the way I'd been taught. Drawing chakra was kind of weird - unless you were a hell of a natural sensor, there was a fair bit of guessing involved, because there was no real measurement for chakra, except in sweeping terms of rank. Drawing on my chakra, though, was a lot easier now than it had been when we'd started. It was a careful mixing of physical and mental (or 'spiritual') energies.

I made the seals with my hands, slowly and carefully - there was no point showing off how fast I could do them and messing it up! - and I released the buildup of chakra through the seals.

Nothing happened. The chakra didn't even seem to go anywhere. It was as if it wasn't enough, so it wasn't doing anything. I frowned. That was odd. Well, it  _was_  hard to measure. Maybe... I needed more than I thought I had?

So I did it again, building up the chakra until it was enough to use for the jutsu. The pressure in my head seemed to increase as I did it, but - well, I'd never really tried an actual jutsu before, and there was always a bit of pressure, even with those minor control exercises. Maybe all ninjutsu felt like that, and you just had to learn to deal with it.

I released the jutsu.

The good news was: I replaced myself.

Unfortunately, the side-effect of replacing myself was that I saw my new location, contemplated my victory, and then -

Let me tell you, colliding with a semitrailer hurt less than whatever happened inside my skull at that moment.

I had a second to witness the smile on Mizuki-sensei's face change to horrified alarm before my vision tunnelled, my hearing thinned, and everything went to static, then blackness.

I woke up three hours later in hospital with a medic peering down at me, green-lit hands slowly drawing away from my head.

I blinked. My head hurt. The light hurt my eyes.

"His records do say his chakra system was affected by an advanced genjutsu placed upon him during the Uchiha Massacre," the medic said, leaning away from me again. I squinted to see who he was talking to, and found Mizuki-sensei standing there, gnawing a thumbnail nervously. After a second, he saw my eyes open and relaxed a little.

"We had hoped that it wouldn't have any long-term effects, but..." the medic sighed. "The problem is that Uchiha-kun has much, much more spiritual energy than physical. The academy teaches students to draw equal amounts of energy to create chakra, and so... I can't swear to it, but you said he did the jutsu correctly?"

Mizuki nodded. "It looked textbook to me," he said slowly. "And then he blacked out."

As a teacher, that must have been scary.

The medic nodded, though. "To do that, he would have been drawing significantly more mental energy than physical, and the energy that was not used in the technique had nowhere to go, so it ...rebounded." He made a gesture that in no way described how much pain I was in.

Mizuki looked pensive. "That's going to make passing the academy difficult," he said slowly, this time directing his comment to me.

The medic glanced at his charts with his brow furrowed. "Not impossible," he said after a few moments examining the information. "Mental energy is usually a much larger component of genjutsu, and two of the academy level jutsu can be replaced with genjutsu with a little creativity."

Mizuki frowned. "Hypothetically, yes," he said, "but genjutsu is much harder to use than those basic ninjutsu."

The medic shrugged. "A problem for another time, Mizuki-sensei. For now, Uchiha-kun should not be allowed to participate in practising ninjutsu."

Oh. Oh,  _crap_.

The medic turned to me, finally, and touched a hand to my head. There was a green flicker and he nodded as if satisfied. "Your head is going to hurt for some time, Uchiha-kun," he informed me.

I nodded, and then kind of wished I hadn't. My brain felt sloppy, like too much head movement might make it spill out somehow. "No ninjutsu?" I said.

The medic gave me a sympathetic look. "There are ways to improve your control of your energies, perhaps enough to do some of the lower-ranked ninjutsu," he said. "But I'd strongly recommend you focus on your other skills for now."

"Okay," I said slowly. I glanced at Mizuki-sensei who was rubbing his forehead as though he was thinking precisely what I was: that I now sucked at two of the three shinobi disciplines.

Forget reaching the top of the class like Sasuke had in canon. At this point there was no guarantee I was even going to  _graduate_.


	4. Chapter 4

Mizuki walked me home - less, I think, out of kindness and more out of the understanding that he would be facing a seething village council if the last Uchiha kid passed out and expired in the middle of the street when he was meant to be watching me - but he blanched when I turned toward the derelict Uchiha compound, like he'd forgotten it was where I lived. He eyed the high walls and empty buildings uncertainly.

I took pity on him. "I can make it from here, Mizuki-sensei."

He flicked a look in my direction, one which seemed resentful. I wasn't sure why - it wasn't my fault he was obvious.

"You'll need to focus on improving your taijutsu if you want to graduate," he said after an awkward pause, ignoring my comment. "And I'll assign you something else to do during jutsu practice," he added thoughtfully.

I pretended his change of subject had been a lot smoother than it was. I nodded, and he preceeded me into the clan compound with a faintly grim expression. Fleetingly, I wondered if he was afraid of ghosts. He distracted me when he spoke again.

"We can make it an extra credit assignment," he said, warming to the idea. Which was good, because the way this was going I was going to need all the extra credit I could get. "Do you have any ideas about what you might want to learn about?"

There were a lot of areas that weren't really covered in the academy that the teachers undoubtedly knew something about. Codes, genjutsu, fuuinjutsu basics, kenjutsu... Some of those might be really useful to learn.

"Didn't the medic say that genjutsu required more mental energy?" I asked after a few moments of contemplation.

Mizuki-sensei frowned. He hesitated. "That's true," he agreed after a long pause, "genjutsu is technically under the yin release - that is, techniques governed by mental energy - that's why we don't usually teach anything except how to break it at the academy. But it requires a lot of concentration and a very delicate touch. It can be very difficult to learn, expecially for somebody so young," he added. "Besides, it's a lot of work for very little gain. That's why genjutsu specialists are few and far between. I think it might be better to focus on something with a broader range of applications..."

I eyed him for a moment, but by then our feet had taken us to the steps of my house.

"Well, your head must still be killing you. Why don't you get an early night? You can think on it and get back to me," he suggested.

"Aa," I agreed, and we parted ways there.

The headache that night got worse before it got better. By the time I managed to bathe and get back up to my room it was so bad I had to squint to do my homework, and after that I pulled the blinds and crawled into bed in the blessed darkness, and never mind if it was only six and I hadn't eaten.

Cringing into my pillow, I wondered if this world had ibuprofen.

(Or cyanide. I wasn't feeling picky.)

The next morning I felt much less awful. I got up and, following a jog and my ritual abuse of the forest for taijutsu practice, I stretched, bathed, and thought about how the hell I was going to graduate. Even aside from that, if the bits of the manga I remembered meant anything, being a ninja was going to involve a serious amount of actual fighting - and significantly less sneaking and quiet murder or sabotage than the word 'ninja' might actually imply - and I was going to need to develop a complementary set of skills if I wanted to last even a second out there.

Heaven help me if I ended up fighting Orochimaru in the forest of death.

"Well," I muttered to myself, examining my notes rather wearily, "what  _can_  I do?"

Theory, obviously. I was very good at theory. People who were bad at theoretical concepts did not study the arts; they went and studied something practical and useful instead. Konoha didn't really have much use for people who could evaluate the socio-political context and far-reaching impact or connotations of works of writing. It was. Uh...

It was kind of a niche.

(Although I was looking forward to reading the Icha Icha series if I could get my grubby prepubescent hands on it.)

I turned over a page of my notes and began scribbling down the things I  _could_  do.

Theory was all well and good, but hardly a combat skill. Although - quick analysis was, and I was good at that, too. Throwing things, definitely - I was still the top of the class for that. Even without the sharingan, I had really excellent eyes and my aim was fantastic - and it helped that I had fewer problems with the idea of inflicting pain and injury at a distance. When I wasn't imagining snapping people's bones and ligaments with my actual hands, it seemed a lot easier.

I was good at a  _lot_  of the secondary skills, to be honest: astronavigation, tracking, tactical planning, critical analysis of intel and written reports. I could mark a trail, make a smokeless fire, do basic first aid and cook over an open fire.

I even had good scores in our survival exercises, despite being initially squeamish about killing and gutting a cute fluffy bunny for dinner. (From the way some of the chuunin instructors looked at me during that first exercise, I think some of them thought I was going to flip at the sight of the blood.) But bunnies weren't  _people_ , and I didn't have a lot of strong feelings about them.

None of that was actually useful for  _fighting people._

I scowled down at my scribbled notes.

Throwing weapons, I decided grimly, were what I had to work with. Well, plenty of ninja did very well using their throwing weapons. The academy only taught the use of kunai and shuriken, but I was certain the clan's library would have some information on others - senbon, at least, were fairly popular.

I glanced at the clock and realised I had to leave pretty much immediately if I wanted to be on time for class, so I grabbed my bag and left.

The walk to the academy gave me time to think over what had happened. Too much mental energy was a rare problem, and not one I remembered Sasuke having in the manga. After a little contemplation, I theorised it had something to do with me, personally. Perhaps all the years of extra experience from my past life had some impact on my ability to generate the different kinds of energy?

I'd probably never know for sure, since it wasn't information I intended to share with anybody, but it comforted me to have a theory.

"Ne, Sasuke-kun!" Sakura was suddenly, somehow, just  _there_.

This was the first year I'd actually shared a class group with her, and I really did not know how to treat her. I knew she'd become pretty badass as she grew older, but right now she made me feel... uh...

Yeah, she creeped me the fuck out.

She was just a little too... intent.

I didn't even understand how it had happened. I wasn't the best in the class - at the moment that was, weirdly, Shino, who still didn't have any of his own fans. I was probably fourth or fifth, and I felt like I was surely soon to be  _dead last,_  because apparently I couldn't be relied upon to execute the smallest of jutsu without passing out.

I had always assumed Sasuke had so many young, crazed admirers because he was talented and clever and, yes, kind of an asshole (sorry, "mysterious"). I knew I wasn't the most talented, and clever - well, sure, but it was hard to judge, given that I was more than a decade older than most of these kids - and I didn't  _think_  I was an asshole.

I wasn't trying to be, if I was.

Although sometimes it was hard to have patience with a bunch of ten year olds.

Especially ten year olds like Sakura.

"It was so scary when you got hurt yesterday!" she exclaimed, inching closer. And closer. I swallowed, inching away. She reached out and casually touched my elbow, and I looked at her pale fingers in a state approaching panic. "Are you feeling okay now, Sasuke-kun?"

"Careful, Sakura, he's  _delicate_ ," Kiba yelled, much more loudly than necessary, from only a few feet away. Heads turned.

He received a cuff over the head from his elder sister for his trouble. "Shut up," Hana said, rolling her eyes while he snarled at her and nursed his bruised skull.

I eyed him for a second - long enough for him to catch my eye and bare his teeth. I rolled my eyes. Idiot.

"I'm fine, Sakura," I said politely, trying to disentangle myself.

"Woman," said a familiar voice, and I braced myself because that was Shikamaru heaving a sigh, and on the tail of that would come -

"Ne, Sasuke-kun~" Ino appeared on my other side. She linked her arm through mine and rubbed her face on my shoulder like some overgrown cat.

I winced internally and cast my eyes about - maybe he was kind to mourning kids, but Inoichi was also hideously and terrifyingly protective of his baby girl. But it looked like Shikaku was slacking off from his real job to bring the kids to school today.

He looked bored, but his lip twitched when he met my eye.

He did absolutely nothing to draw Ino away from me.

Bastard.

From either side of me, Ino and Sakura were aiming impressive glares at one another. I wondered if they were going to forget me and start trying to murder each other. I could only hope. It may be my only chance for escape.

"Mou, Sakura-chan, still showing off your  _giant forehead_?" Ino cooed sweetly.

"Sorry, what's that, Ino-pig? I couldn't hear you over the sound of how fat you are," Sakura sniped back, which, ouch. Sure, it was a play on the whole 'pig' thing but... Low blow, Sakura.

This situation, I thought grimly, would be very different if, oh, _I could do the replacement technique._

Between the two of them, electricity crackled and sparks flew.

While they were distracted, I shrugged their hands away gently and fled for my life.

That escape was all well and good, but by the time our lunch break came around that day, I had been consoled or teased by nearly everybody in my class ('nearly' everybody because Shikamaru, as a rule, didn't care; Hinata, as a rule, didn't  _talk_ ), and also Mizuki-sensei was waiting expectantly for my answer.

Which, surprisingly, I actually had. "Poison," I said firmly.

For a second he looked surprised. His eyebrows rose. "Hmm, it makes sense," he admitted slowly. "Your record with throwing weapons is very good... There aren't any poison specialists working at the academy at the moment," he admitted, "but Suzume-sensei is good with plant-based poisons," Mizuki smiled a little. "I'll see what I can organise."

Two days later, I showed up in the middle of an open field while the rest of the class was doing ninjutsu practice.

Suzume turned out to be a fastidious chuunin-rank woman with narrow glasses, an upturned nose, and a tumbling mop of dark hair. She was, in her way, quite beautiful... but I felt absolutely nothing about it except a vague aesthetic appreciation.

I couldn't wait for puberty to be over. Having adult thoughts and childlike biology was  _weird_.

She gave me an assessing look. "Mizuki-sensei says you have to miss ninjutsu practice for medical reasons?" she inquired.

I nodded.

She clicked her tongue. "With no ninjutsu and average taijutsu, you may well be better off in another line of work," she pointed out, settling her hands on the rounded swell of her hips. Suzume had a lovely hourglass figure, which was something of a rarity among ninja.

"So I've been told," I said blandly. Even if she was probably right, her comments definitely rubbed me the wrong way. I scowled at her. Sasuke's face was good for scowling. "Does it have anything to do with the lesson?"

Her lips thinned. "Only to determine the extent to which I may be wasting my time," she said flatly.

I frowned. "I'm aware of the disadvantages," I told her after a moment's hesitation. "But if I want to make it past genin-rank, I'm going to need to develop a fighting style that suits me. I think learning how to properly use poisons could be a part of that, since my throwing skills are good."

Suzume-sensei eyed me for a few more seconds, and then finally she sighed and adjusted her glasses. "That's a reasonable argument, I suppose," she agreed. "Fine. Let's get started."

That was how my lessons with Suzume-sensei began. We began with theory - a lot of theory - and she drilled it into me day after day, while the other kids learned how to do things that seemed a  _lot_  more interesting - like turning themselves into other people and objects. How cool was that? I kept up on the theory of ninjutsu, because I desperately wanted to do it, but...

Well, my chakra control might have been better than Sasuke's was originally, but that didn't mean very much unless I could precisely use the correct amounts of physical and mental energy.

I was clinging to the idea that the medic had planted - that I might be able to learn that kind of control well enough to do  _some_  ninjutsu, at least. With this in mind, I'd booked myself in to see a chakra specialist at the hospital for a consultation.

That was coincidentally on the same day that Suzume allowed me to do something more practical - which turned out to be coating the tips and edges of her weapons.

Yeah, evidently Suzume-sensei wasn't above using me for free labour. "Is this because you can't be bothered?" I wondered.

She eyed me over the rims of her glasses. While she could be grating and irritating - and she was obsessed with dirt, seriously - she was a clever person, and she had a very sharp tongue when she felt the need. "Uchiha, I am  _allowing_  you to help me as part of your training. If you no longer want to learn about poisons, you may leave at any time."

I rolled my eyes. Okay, maybe I was being a little bit ungrateful. I sighed. "Sorry, sensei," I mumbled.

She sniffed, but didn't make any further comments. The work was interesting, anyway: Suzume-sensei used a variety of different poisons, but they were universally sourced from plants.

"I don't have to catch plants," she pointed out when I asked the obvious question. "Venom from animals can be extremely useful," she agreed, "but you still have to trap the animals and milk them of their venom. It's not impossible, but it is much less complicated to use plant-based poisons."

You would think, given that the village was basically a large, relatively peaceful fortress, that the ninja inside would all share resources: that there'd be centralised manufacture of a lot of our tools, medicines, poisons, antidotes and gear.

But that wasn't the case. Even inside clans, as far as I could tell, people clung tightly to their secrets. Specialised tools and techniques disappeared from use with every death, basically - and new ones appeared as people invented them. With ninja who weren't associated with any family group...

It seemed like either they took on a team of genin, they took on a specific apprentice, or they never taught anybody. There were exceptions - Tsunade was a good example, because she shared several of her medical techniques for the good of the village. But in general... yeah, information and skills did not come cheap in Konoha.

This common, rather paranoid, secrecy made me wonder how people had really looked upon the Uchiha clan - maybe there was more than one reason they'd all been killed, after all. Stealing other ninja's secrets with a glance was not a good way to make friends.

So I just nodded when Suzume told me about the trouble she'd have to go to in order to get poisons from animals. It made sense, even if it seemed kind of lazy.

"Since you're so eager to help," she said drily when she'd finished rolling her weapons into their protective casings, "you can help me grind up strychnine seeds."

"Really?" I blinked.

Her smile probably should have been a warning. "Really," she agreed. "I think you'll find it educational."

Suzume-sensei signed me out of the academy with a wave to a distracted Mizuki-sensei and took me out to the forest.

"Here," she said, once we'd arrived at a very primitive looking stone table. It wasn't exactly laboratory material.

"You'd think they'd put aside a space in the hospital or something," I muttered, thinking of the medical research rooms.

"You'd kill too many people if you had an accident," Suzume pointed out, handing me a breathing filter and a pair of gloves, both of which I pulled on carefully.

She examined the safety precautions before flicking open a scroll and producing a pile of flat, disc-shaped little seeds. From my study of the theory behind plant-based poisons, I knew that they'd already been cut from the fruit, cleaned, dried and sorted out. It seemed like most of the work had basically been done.

"You say that now," she said ominously when I pointed this out. Then she heaved a sigh through her filter. "We'd better get started."

And that was how I learned that it's really,  _really_  hard to grind down strychnine seeds. It wasn't like grinding wood, or coffee beans, or - or anything, really. They were harder than some types of steel, I was sure of it.

"Having fun yet?" Suzume-sensei asked me after about an hour of "education".

I grunted, trying to ignore the burgeoning ache in my shoulders and arms. At least she was doing it with me - small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

It only took us two hours or so to grind up all the seeds Suzume-sensei wanted, but by the time we were done my arms were screaming.

"Why do you even need poisoned weapons?" I wondered, watching her carefully as she showed me how to seal away the important bits. The dust had settled, but we still had to be careful not to inhale any of it.

Suzume-sensei raised her eyebrows. "Academy teachers wouldn't be very good at teaching ninja skills if we never went on missions," she pointed out.

I eyed her. She didn't  _look_  like she did a lot of missions. She looked... curvy and luxurious and carefully put-together. "...really?"

She laughed, then gave me a mysterious smile. "Oh, Uchiha-kun," she said, sounding terribly amused. "Not all missions are about sweating and fighting, ne?" Then she leaned forward and ruffled my hair. Her glasses flashed in an errant ray of light. "If you were a kunoichi, you might understand," she assured me.

That was... not as comforting as she probably assumed, since I was still getting used to the part of my new life where I was biologically male.

* * *

The chakra specialist turned out to be a branch Hyuuga with a blank face and a soft voice. Although most of that clan were combat specialists, a few of them did seem to go into medicine. I'd even seen one or two of them leaving the T&I building, which I didn't necessarily want to contemplate.

He had me do several chakra control exercises - sticking paper to my forehead, then my fingertips, then several fingertips at once.

I thought his expectations of my ability to manipulate chakra were a little biased, since he seemed colossally unimpressed when I admitted I couldn't stick more than two pieces of paper to my skin at once. I was pretty sure nobody else in my class could do that either, but it didn't prevent me from feeling thoroughly embarrassed under his cool gaze.

Eventually he gestured me imperiously back into the seat across from him and tucked some long, dark hair away from his face. The seal on his forehead showed up clear and bright, and he seemed totally unashamed about it. "I would be very surprised, Sasuke-san, if you were ever capable of a B-class ninjutsu or higher."

I stared at him.

His expression didn't waver. Sympathy was probably a feeling the Hyuuga clan had bred out long ago. "Your chakra control is simply not good enough, and it never will be. While practice can help, and will likely allow you the use of E- and D- ranked ninjutsu with time," he went on blandly, "other factors influence your control. One is the amount of chakra you have - which is a lot, for your age," he admitted, although his tone didn't imply that was a particularly good thing, "but many of them are genetic. Almost all of the Uchiha clan has -  _had_ -" he corrected himself, looking briefly but acutely uncomfortable "-good, workmanlike chakra skills, but..."

I rubbed my forehead. Already I could feel a headache coming on. Again. "Perfect chakra control is pretty rare," I finished for him.

He nodded.

I tapped my fingertips on his desk. "If I wanted to improve?"

"Practice," he said, "although you'd be better off working on your aptitude for the two other shinobi disciplines. Taijutsu is necessary for any genin wishing to advance, and genjutsu can be extremely difficult to learn, but it would be significantly less likely to cause you to fall unconscious, which," he added a little drily, "can only be an advantage in combat."

A Hyuuga with a sense of humour. How novel. Of course I'd only find one when he was laughing at my expense.

"Thank you, sensei," I said grimly, and excused myself.


	5. Chapter 5

I had a few more conversations with Mizuki about learning genjutsu, but he remained firm in his position that it would only distract me from the work I was doing at the academy. If I heard the phrase "why don't you work on your taijutsu instead?" one more time I thought I was probably going to scream.

My instructors thought that my hesitation in close combat came from a single, very recent, traumatic event, and that there was still all of Sasuke's earlier desensitisation to build on if I just worked hard enough. I was pretty much unable to correct that assumption without drawing a lot of scary attention to myself, so I simply didn't.

I spent a lot of my rapidly-dwindling spare time sorting through texts in the family library. Unfortunately, the Uchiha libraries seemed to assume a working knowledge of the very basics of almost every discipline they discussed. That wasn't a problem when I was reading about poisons or shurikenjutsu, but since the academy taught virtually nothing about genjutsu, it was a topic on which I found myself completely lost. Even worse, it seemed like the Uchiha clan had basically no interest in genjutsu when it wasn't cast by the sharingan.

I would like to say that I got onto it immediately and sought out more information, but the truth of the matter is that I was already over-committed: when I wasn't engaged in formal learning at the academy or with Suzume-sensei, I was running for fitness and speed, doing taijutsu practice or focusing on endless and hideously repetitive chakra control exercises.

I could be found after school, now, carefully sticking bits of paper to myself with my chakra. Keeping my attention on multiple things at once was actually really tricky. It took me almost a month to get up to four papers.

"Good thing  _I'm_  not the main character," I muttered to myself when I finally -  _finally_  - reached that milestone.

Although I was, technically,  _a_  main character. And that worried me. The sort of stuff that happened to Sasuke in the future...

I wasn't sure if I even remembered it all clearly, let alone that I had much idea about how to fix it. Weren't all Sasuke's problems basically related to how he ran away from Konoha to follow Orochimaru? And wasn't that because he wanted the power to kill Itachi?

I didn't especially want to kill Itachi, so it all seemed kind of moot.

All I had to do was _not_ betray Konoha to Orochimaru.

Right? Right.

I was sure that would be a lot easier said than done, but... well, no plan survives contact with the enemy. I had years yet, and right now the only thing I could do was train hard, train often, and try my best to be prepared for what might be coming my way.

Of course I had days when I couldn't muster the motivation to be so very disciplined. On those days I could usually just about manage to get out of bed and go for a jog, but anything else left me frustrated and itching to skive off and go do something interesting. Training, for all its physical benefits, was not always a thrilling pastime.

I usually spent that time lazing around in bed thinking about the things and people I'd lost - which was depressing like you would not  _believe_. Or, more sensibly, and increasingly as time wore away the fierceness of my grief, I'd spend them doing other necessary things.

In my previous life I'd loved sewing and cooking, and now, when I couldn't handle dedicating myself to training for one more second, I spent that time in a way that felt both productive and enjoyable.

My clothes always seemed to need mending, which I supposed was just a part of being a ninja. When I wore them too thin they went into the rag basket, where I used them for cleaning - a necessary chore, but one I absolutely loathed.

There was something extremely meditative about sewing, about watching stitches progress through my fabric under the flash of a needle. My eyes were good - better than they'd ever been, really - and my fingers were small but deft. It was a soothing pastime. I tried cooking, but the available produce meant that I ended up with a lot of slightly weird experiments before I started to understand how the available flavours worked together. In this world, a ninja village like Konoha was not really designed for open trade, so a lot of what could be got at the market here was limited to what was locally grown. We ate well enough, with nearby farming settlements and carefully-guarded village emergency stores, but... well, variety was not at all the same. There was a lot of rice, vegetables and meat, and many things were dehydrated, pickled or salted to keep for long periods.

I made an effort to check out the cook books the clan had left behind, but... well, they were often written in indecipherable shorthand and with scrawled revisions. They weren't at all like the kinds of cook books I was used to in my old life. The best kept one was probably Uchiha Mikoto's, and her handwritten recipes were very strange to me. Her notes contained all sorts of recipes, from basic onigiri to the most complicated sets of recipes for seasonal kaiseki.

I had never even tried to make onigiri before. My first attempt was not specifically a disaster, but the balls of rice did not hold their shape very well, so... I ended up eating a bowl of rice and seaweed and pickled plums. Which wasn't bad, but...

Yeah.

Mostly I decided to stick to simple stuff: rice and fried meat and steamed or blanched vegetables. And if it wasn't very exciting, well... at least it was nutritious.

Shopping for food in and of itself could be a little bit of a trial. It had been two years since the massacre, but every time I left the compound people looked at me swore I could see them thinking 'there's that boy whose whole family is dead,' and maybe that was just me being crazy and paranoid about it, but I didn't think so. I really didn't like it.

I tried not to end up at the market more than once a week, because civilians were even less subtle than ninja. "Tut, tut," they'd say, peering down at me, "it's not right, a boy like you living all on your own. Can't anybody do anything?"

And then, having learned my lesson the first time I pointed out that I didn't really want to live with anybody else, I'd lie and tell them, "No. Nobody can do anything. It's political."

And then they'd coo over how clever I must be to understand the idea of a political decision and send me on my way.

It was a little... disconcerting, to say the least.

It was true that I preferred being on my own, but it was also true that being on my own was horribly lonely. It certainly didn't help that I wasn't great at making friends. I hadn't ever had really great social skills, even in my previous life. It was getting better, a little, as I remembered more and more what ten year olds were like, but...

Suzume was basically my only adult company, and she still operated under the assumption that I was a kid. A clever kid, but a kid nonetheless.

Still, her lessons began to seem like a bright spot in my day, because it was one of the few times when I wasn't either completely alone or surrounded by screaming ninja children.

"Mou," she sighed, watching me like a hawk while I was making a tincture of aconite. "Sasuke, you need to be more careful. You know it can be absorbed through your skin."

"I am being careful," I pointed out. I was, too - it was just a little hard to avoid skin contact, despite the gloves. I wasn't about to tell her, but there was already a tiny tingling on my wrist where I'd accidentally let a leaf linger too long on a patch of skin not covered by my gloves.

She gave me a look that said that she knew exactly what I hadn't told her, which was probably true. Ninjas, man. Then she sighed. "If you're really serious about working with poisons," she said after a long pause, "you should begin taking low doses to build up a tolerance. Especially," she added, scrunching up her nose, "if you ever want to work with them in a combat capacity."

Mithridatism, I knew, had few really good applications in real life back in my old world - mostly snake handlers, I thought I remembered? But here, there were people poisoning each other freaking everywhere, and the body's mechanisms were heavily reliant on chakra. As ninja, our heavily developed chakra systems made our healing even further divorced from what I'd learned in my previous life about biology.

So instead of wondering about this, I just nodded. "Aa," I said, not taking my eyes off the leaves. After a second I added: "How do I start?"

"Did you have anything planned for this weekend?" she asked, tapping her lower lip.

"Training."

She hmmed. "Well, this is training too. You can take Saturday off. We can start with something fairly benign - non-fatal, common..." she began searching through her belongings for a particular scroll. Finished with my preparation of tincture of aconite, I sat back and watched her curiously.

"Ah," she said finally. With a puff of smoke she produced a handful of nutmeg seeds. "What can you tell me about these?" she asked.

I eyed them. "They contain myristicin. It's not often lethal, but it's easy to slip into food because it's used in much smaller doses as a spice. The taste is therefore familiar and less likely to be noticed. Physical effects include headaches, nausea, dizziness, confusion, red eyes, loss of memory and sometimes paranoia..." I thought for a long moment. Knowing the symptoms was all well and good, but a poisoner also had to know why you might want to use it. "It can last for more than a day, and it's useful for making somebody miss a planned event or appointment due to illness. Usually people recover without medical help. It's not a combat poison, though," I pointed out.

"No," she said, "but there have been several occasions on which I've had to eat a meal with my mark, and it would have been very inconvenient to get sick. So you may as well do the thing properly. You've got at least another year before you even attempt the graduation exam, correct?"

I nodded.

"Well then," she shrugged, "we've got plenty of time to work through poisons. It would be dangerous to try to adapt to all of them at once. You might as well start with this one."

She calculated the dose for my weight in her head and began counting out seeds.

It tasted terrible. I also felt a certain degree of anxiety about the process. Taking poison seemed like the opposite of a good idea, really. But I resolved to think of it as a kind of unpleasant, slightly risky medical intervention.

I swallowed the dose Suzume-sensei prepared for me despite my anxiety. She was correct, and the more poisons I could build a resistance to the better I could use them. At least I knew this was unlikely to be fatal, even if she had the dose wrong.

"All right," she checked her watch. "You might not have much in the way of side-effects," she shrugged, "which will be all to the better, I imagine. Still. Make sure you drink water and eat food and don't train today or tomorrow and you'll be fine."

I nodded seriously.

She kept an eye on me for the next several hours, during which my only symptoms appeared to be sweating and dryness of mouth. Just in case, we stopped working with real poisons and went back to theoretical work. Since I had the basics down, Suzume-sensei liked to tell me stories illustrating where certain compounds had been used to great effect.

I'm not saying that I wouldn't have preferred to be learning how to do cool ninjutsu, but it was also pretty interesting listening to how poisons dumped in the water supply were excellent for mimicking disease, how you could mess with a target's memory without ever resorting to chakra, how you could induce anger or lust or anxiety or depression in another person...

Over time, it had become clear to me that Suzume-sensei, beneath her tightly-laced exterior, had an almost romantic love of control.

No wonder she liked this shit.

When the final bell rang, she examined my eyes, checked my pulse and asked me how I felt. I felt a little fuzzy, a bit hungover, but otherwise nothing too bad.

"Good," she nodded. "All right, go home.  _No training,_ " she added.

"I heard you," I rolled my eyes. I pulled my bag over one shoulder and made the walk home.

Leaving the academy was usually a test of my stealth skills, because if I wasn't careful one of the girls would walk with me the whole way home and give me cow-eyes, brimming with tears, at the gates of the abandoned clan compound.

Sometimes I could rely on a  _little_ help. I didn't have many friends, no, but I'd developed a relatively cordial relationship with Chouji, who was far and away the sweetest of the kids in my cohort. And maybe Shikamaru was the smartest - well, not maybe, really, he was very, very smart, in a sleepy-eyed and languid way that showed only in a very occasional lightning crack of brilliance - but I thought Chouji was the most mature by far.

The best thing about Chouji in this case, though? He was big enough to shield me. I don't know how he felt about that, since he could be quite sensitive about his bulk (which was ridiculous, since almost all of his family techniques required it, but, hey, kids could be cruel), but he never complained about it. If I was quick, quiet, and very, very careful, I could get past all the other students with nobody but him the wiser.

Today was... not that day.

Unfortunately.

"Sasuke-kuuuun!"

Oh, god. I knew Ino and Sakura were both going to grow up to be competent, effective ninja, but as kids they just made me feel faintly ashamed for my entire gender.

Was I ever like that?

I couldn't remember. I sure hoped not.

Ino attached herself to my arm immediately. I let it happen while I contemplated my options - and once again I resolved to practice my chakra control diligently so I could one day learn the replacement technique.

Within seconds, Sakura flew to my other side and I was once again bracketed by them. "I didn't see you during lunch today, Sasuke-kun," she told me with big, worried green eyes, and -

Oh, god, these girls were scary. Their eyes burned with a fierce intensity.

"That's correct," I told her, looking around for an escape route.

I could see Akimichi Chouza up ahead, standing inches above the few other parents and siblings who showed up to meet with the students leaving the academy. Even if he hadn't been taller than everybody else, his wild hair was easily detectable in a crowd. Chouji was already there with him, munching on a packet of crisps and telling his father about something.

I wondered if the older ninja would be able to somehow sense me if I stared at him hard enough. Inoichi certainly could. It took Chouza a few seconds longer, but he did look up after a moment.

Whatever expression was on my face must have been very entertaining, because he cracked a huge smile. "Ino-chan!" he boomed, waving to her.

She winced a little at the sound, and looked upon Chouza and Chouji grimly, as though they were both a hideous embarrassment to be borne. I didn't know what her problem was, really, since Chouza was a towering beast of a man in full armour. There were more intimidating shinobi in Konoha, but not by much. Surely intimidating was badass and thus cool?

But Ino didn't seem to think so, and she shrunk away a little as Chouza strode forward to envelop her in a crushing hug. He lifted her off her feet and swung her into the air, almost taking me with her.

Next to me, Sakura paled and her grip on me loosened as she tried to edge away. That was all I needed: I slipped free of her and disappeared into the crowd. A moment later I heard her say "Eh? Eh!" in the sudden realisation that she'd lost me.

Phew.

I made it home without any other scary run-ins, did my written homework and ate a rice ball. I didn't feel great, and my eyes looked really red in the mirror, but over all, this didn't seem so bad. If this was what developing immunity to poisons was going to be like, I was sure I'd be fine.

Within fifteen minutes of that thought, of course, I was confused and upset and my thoughts were racing away from me in a trail of glittering light. I couldn't quite catch them. Everything was moving too fast.

I stood in the bathroom, looking in the mirror. Every time I thought I was going to be okay to leave the bathroom my stomach would heave and and wriggle with nausea.

I hunched over the sink and tried to breathe my way to calmness. It didn't help much. Lights flickered in front of my eyes.

After ten or twenty minutes I lowered myself to the floor. The bathroom was tiled. If I vomited everywhere it wouldn't be that hard to clean up. I rested my back against the wall and waited.

And waited.

I'd had some fairly horrible nights in my life. This wasn't as frightening as the night I'd died, but it... it wasn't great.

I felt crazy, like everything was terribly wrong and my stomach was trying to crawl out my throat. When I stood up enough to see myself in the bathroom mirror I flinched away. Who was that? What was that person doing there? Oh. It was me.

I wanted it to stop, but there was no stopping it. I had to wait it out.

"It's not lethal," I assured myself every time I panicked and felt like I should rush off to the clinic. "It's not lethal."

By the time light was coming through the window high above the sink again, my eyelids felt like they were made of sandpaper.

I felt terrible.

Was it meant to last this long?

I had to think very hard to dredge up that information. Yes, I thought. It would probably last for some time.

I got up and vomited into the toilet bowl. Hmm. I needed to clean the toilet. Not my favourite task. The sounds of my retching made strange colours dance in front of my eyes.

I thought back to what Suzume-sensei had said. I needed to drink water and eat something. I was sure she hadn't expected this, but -

I stumbled to the kitchen.

Upon realising that I had no food, because I usually went shopping at the market on Saturdays, I swore. It came out more as a weird croak.

Maybe I could just go to bed.

I didn't feel like I could sleep.

Maybe I should go back to the bathroom?

I thought about Suzume-sensei's instructions. 'Make sure you drink water and eat food,' and I didn't know what to do. Everything was very, very confusing.

I shoved a glass under the faucet and downed a cup of water quickly. It made my stomach roll, but not too badly. Probably it was still resting from having thrown up earlier.

Food.

There was a convenience store only a couple of blocks away from the compound. I could probably get something there. I thought about the walk. Could I do that?

I was relatively steady on my feet, even though everything was a bit fuzzy and I felt like I couldn't move fast enough. Objects left trails of light and colour in my vision when I moved my head, but I could walk.

Yeah, I thought. I could do that.

I grabbed some money and headed out.

I was about a block away from the store when the whole world seemed to rush at me all at once and I had the sudden panicked thought that, no, I  _couldn't_ do this.

"Don't be ridiculous," I muttered, closing my eyes against all the strange external stimuli. The light and colour continued behind my eyelids. I breathed. Okay. It was going to be okay.

I kept walking.

Making it all the way to the convenience store actually felt like an enormous victory. It was about eight in the morning and the place was mostly empty, except for a bored-looking cashier who did not even glance up when I entered.

Instant noodles, I thought, spotting them. That would be great. Barely any preparation required. I went to get them. Any flavour that wasn't sweet.

As I approached it became apparent that a weird orange streak was between me and the noodles.

"Hey, hey, are you okay?" It asked.

I squinted. Oh, no, that wasn't a hallucination. That was a boy dressed in bright orange, he just wouldn't stop moving. He waved a hand at my face.

Oh, I thought. That was Naruto.

I knew I'd have to run into him eventually, but this was not how I'd expected that to go.

I couldn't deal with this right now. I just - I had to get the food and leave and go home. That was the goal. Right.

"I'm fine," I said, ignoring how everything lit up when I spoke. I _was_  fine, really. I was just experiencing some unpleasant side effects.

"You look really sick," he said, peering at me. He was too close. I jerked away. "Your eyes are all red."

"I'm  _fine_ ," I growled. I didn't need this. I just needed to pay for my goddamn noodles and go home where I could wallow in how incredibly terrible I felt and plot Suzume-sensei's demise. She could  _not_  have miscalculated the dose so badly.

He scowled at me. "I'm just trying to help, you grumpy bastard," he said.

"Hey!" the cashier's voice cut across our conversation. "Is that brat bothering you?" There was a very dark stare shot in Naruto's direction. "If you're going to bother my customers, you can leave, you little-"

It was a struggle to see Naruto's face, but I probably didn't have to. From his voice, which lit everything an angry red, he was probably looking mutinous. "I'm just trying to -"

"No," I said very flatly. Maybe I didn't want to deal with Naruto, who was a hyperactive loud little shit, but the way some of the villagers took any excuse to make his life more difficult... that made me annoyed. "That's really rude," I added, because I couldn't think of any better words.

The cashier's eyebrows rose. "Well, he's..."

"Whatever," I said, which was equally rude. I shoved my packets of noodles onto the counter - five to a pack, multiple flavours. Perfect. I put down some money and left.

"Hang on, do you want your change?"

I ignored the voice of the cashier. My stomach was rolling and the lights were dancing.

The bell ringing above the door of the convenience store was clearly my undoing, because it caused a sudden wash of nausea that meant I ended up bracing myself against the wall of the shop and throwing up, again.

"Suzume-sensei..." I growled, staring exhaustedly at the unpaved street. It was early enough that almost nobody was out, and most of the stores were still shut. Which was good, because I didn't especially want them to see me vomiting in the street like a common drunk.

"Hey!" That was Naruto.  _Again_.

I braced myself with one hand on the wall, the other clutching my noodles like a lifeline.

"Hey, you're really not okay," he said. "You need a, uh, a doctor or something," he went on.

Yeah,  _that_  would be embarrassing: 'Well, sensei, I poisoned myself on purpose and now I need you to fix it.'

"It'll wear off," I said firmly, finally straightening up.

When I got my eyes to focus, Naruto did not look happy. He looked recalcitrant and stubborn with his eyebrows drawn and his hands clenched.

"It will wear off," I said again. "I had a training accident. I just need to go home and eat some food and sleep it off."

He brightened. "A training accident? Ne, ne, are you gonna be a ninja too?"

"At this rate who even knows," I muttered, too low for him to hear.

"Eh?" he leaned in closer.

"Yes, I'm training to be a ninja. Right now, though, I need to go home, which means I need you to not be in my way."

He gave me a suspicious look. "I'll walk you," he declared magnanimously, as though he was actually doing me a favour.

"No, I-"

"Which way? This way?"

"This way, idiot," I corrected him, and then he grinned and I realised I'd just implied he'd be walking me home, which...

Dammit. It wasn't fair to pick on drugged people!

"Are you at the academy?" he asked cheerfully, throwing my arm over his shoulder. He was shorter than me, but not by much. It was actually kind of nice to have somebody to lean against right then.

"Are you always this friendly?" I shot back darkly. I knew I should be nice to Naruto for all sorts of reasons - he was the main character, he'd be an absolute monster in combat when he was a little older, he was ridiculously loyal to his precious people, he was lonely and it was the right thing to do... and of course not least because if he lost his temper he could unleash a giant murderous demon fox and kill me. He probably wouldn't, but the possibility existed.

But I was confuse and tired and so, so sick, and he was  _annoying_. He didn't exactly make it easy on me.

"Ahaha," he laughed nervously, scratching his neck with one hand. "Well..."

I eyed him, but didn't say anything. I had no idea why he was trying to be friendly. "Okay," I sighed. "We turn here."

"Eh? But there's nothing down there," he said. He squinted at me. "Are you lost?"

"I'm not  _lost_ ," I growled, shoving him with one hip. "My house is down there." I totally didn't need him helping me along. I straightened and took off on my own.

"Hey!" He caught up easily, and fell into step. "You're sure?"

"Am I sure if  _this is where I live_?" I snapped back incredulously.

"Ehh... I guess you would be." He scratched his chin. "Just, 'cause everybody says that's where all the ghosts live."

"Ghosts don't live there. Ghosts don't  _live_ ," I said. I'd had no idea that people were telling each other the Uchiha compound was haunted. That was... rude. Humiliating. I wondered if other kids in my cohort at the academy were saying that.

There was a wooden gate beneath the square arch, atop which the Uchiha fan was displayed. I shoved it open and walked in. Naruto followed me, but I didn't call him on it.

"If there's no ghosts," Naruto said, peering around, "why is there nobody here?" I could see him hesitate at the sight of one of the more damaged houses. My vision swam.

"If you don't want to be here, you can go," I pointed out.

He scowled. "I'm just asking."

Another wave of nausea hit me. Fucking  _Suzume_. "Ask when I'm not poisoned," I growled.

"Eh? You got poisoned? How did you - Hey! Hey, wait," he broke into a trot to keep up with me, and then he was going a mile a minute, mouth rattling off whatever came into his mind.

I unlocked the door and kicked my shoes off in the genkan.. "Here," I shoved my instant noodles at him. "Boil the water. Make some ramen. You can have half of it, leave me some. I need..."

What did I need?

Sleep. To  _not_  be poisoned.

"I need the bathroom," I decided, as my stomach contemplated rejecting its lining.

Naruto's brain seemed to have stopped entirely at the word 'ramen' and he rocketed off in the direction I'd pointed. He hadn't bothered to take his shoes off, which was... really rude, but he probably didn't mean it to be. He wasn't leaving tracks anyway.

I went up to the bathroom, hovered uncertainly for a few minutes and muttered some more curses when I did not, in fact, have to throw up. I washed out my mouth and grabbed some of my notes from Suzume-sensei's classes then headed down to where I could hear the sound of the kettle heating.

Naruto was messing around with the stuff on the kitchen table, which was mostly just homework and a few practice weapons. "So you  _are_  in the academy?" he looked so excited about something and I honestly couldn't be sure what.

"I am," I agreed. I was beginning, slowly, to feel more lucid... but also more hung over. And sleepy. I flipped through my notes until I found a section on myristicin. "Nausea, dizziness, dry mouth, confusion, red eyes, hallucinations..."

Yeah, she'd definitely given me too much. She couldn't have done this by accident. I snapped the book shut, scowling.

Naruto had been talking.

"What?" I asked.

"You want the shrimp or the pork?" he repeated.

I realised that the kettle had boiled.

"Shrimp," I said vaguely. It all just tasted like salt and fat to me.

Three minutes later a steaming styrofoam cup was planted on the table in front of me. I looked up.

Naruto sat down with his pork flavoured ramen and began inhaling it. I poked at mine without much enthusiasm.

"Oo ont ike amer?" he asked.

He pointed at the noodles, so I had some idea of what he'd said. His manners really were kind of appalling. "It's fine," I said, sipping at the oily, synthetic-flavoured broth. "I'm just not hungry."

Not hungry was something of an understatement.

"Hey, yeah, what kinda training were you doing anyway?" Naruto peered at me curiously.

"Training?"

"You said you had a training accident, right?"

"I'm studying poisons. Suzume-sensei made a mistake in a demonstration, and-"

"S _uzume-sensei?_ " Naruto interrupted, bursting out suddenly in laughter.

I tilted my head. "...yeah?"

"But she's the  _girls_ ' teacher! Ne, ne, are you gonna be a kunoichi?"

I snorted softly, and then wished I hadn't when my whole person seemed to give an answering throb. Perhaps that would have been insulting to any other prepubescent boy out there, but I was fundamentally immune to caring about that.

"I could be," I said after a second, thoughtfully. 'Kunoichi' was more of a role than a fixed idea about gender. Seductionists, saboteurs, spies, quiet assassins... that was the role of the kunoichi. They were more like traditional ninja, really. It wasn't what I wanted, but it wasn't a bad fallback position, either. It didn't really matter to me if it was "girly", because... well, I was a girl. Not physically, but... Well, whatever. Maybe I should look into it?

"Eh?" Naruto just looked puzzled at that comment.

I eyed my noodles and decided that gender roles and why they were bullshit was a topic for another day. Or maybe never. Never was pretty good for me, too, actually. "I asked Suzume-sensei to teach me about poisons. There was an accident, now I'm sick. I'll probably fall asleep soon."

That was glossing over the more complicated bits, but it was essentially true.

Naruto made a noise of understanding, and then, without any warning, he began talking about ramen. I grunted occasionally to let him know I was listening, which I was not, and he just kept going under his own power.

When I woke up it was dark and he was gone.

My face was stuck to the lid of a noodle cup, which had been discarded on the table. Okay.

I got to my feet and found that everything ached, but I felt a lot more lucid, and...

...and my clock said I'd slept all day, all night, and all day again.

It was after dark  _the next night._

I rubbed my hands through my hair, finding a gross layer of crusty sweat. Gross. Shower. Shower time, definitely.

When my alarm buzzed in the morning I was still tired, but I was clean and functional. I ripped open another cup of noodles for breakfast because there was literally no other food, downed three glasses of water, and then set off to face the day.

I dodged Ino and Sakura successfully and was in class by the time Mizuki-sensei arrived. Shikamaru had given me one long, sideways glance, but not commented, and Chouji hadn't seemed to notice anything different about my looks.

I made it all the way through Mizuki-sensei's lecture, the physical conditioning practice - which was, at the very least, absolute child's play compared to the amount of training I did daily - and somehow drew Shikamaru to spar against,  _thank god._

He looked at me from across the space we'd been allocated. "I could probably beat you," he said, cracking a yawn.

I thought about it. In a straight-up physical fight, usually I'd beat Shikamaru. I might not be able to break his bones with a punch, but stamina wasn't his strong point, and his taijutsu forms were sloppy. I was sure that on a normal day I could dodge or block anything he threw at me and wear him down until he either dropped or forfeited - in Shikamaru's case, forfeit was much more likely. Today... I wasn't sure he'd win, but...

We both knew I wasn't at my best.

Still, I wasn't about to forfeit to Shikamaru of all people! I settled into a combat stance and showed him my teeth. "Wanna find out?"

He heaved a giant sigh and raised his hand. "I forfeit," he said.

Bluffing. I rolled my eyes and relaxed.

"What the hell?" Kiba bellowed at him, as though he was actually surprised. I wasn't quite sure why, since Shikamaru forfeited about sixty per cent of his spars.

Mizuki-sensei just sighed. "Uchiha wins by forfeit, okay, next."

I hid a sigh of relief. Running and jumping and throwing was one thing, but I didn't really want to do any actual sparring today. After the break, it was ninjutsu practice for the other kids and I...

I went to find Suzume-sensei.

"You," I hissed when I found her.

She glanced over her shoulder and smiled. Her spectacles reflected the light brightly. "Well, really," she said, "what did you think was going to happen, taking poison from a ninja?"

She  _had_  poisoned me on purpose.

I stared. "You're my  _teacher_."

"And it's nice that you have so much faith in me, Sasuke," she said, curving her full lips into a sweet smile, "but you shouldn't trust people so easily." She leaned forward and tapped my nose. "Ne?"

I ground my teeth. "You're a terrible teacher," I glowered.

"Am I? I'm sure you won't forget the lesson in a hurry." She thumped a scroll against my chest and I caught it reflexively. "There now, you can calculate the dose for your next poison all on your own."

And then she left.

That _bitch_.

But she was right.

Lesson learnt.


	6. Chapter 6

Once I had met Naruto, it seemed like I was incapable of  _un_ meeting him. "Ne, ne!" he appeared the second I stepped onto the academy grounds. "You  _do_  go to the academy," he grinned, tucking one hand behind his head.

"Aa," I agreed tonelessly. My voice was very good at toneless grunting, actually. 

"You look better," he said, and then he poked me in the shoulder. "Hey, what's your name anyway?"

I ignored his first comment. "Uchiha Sasuke."

"I'm -"

"Uzumaki Naruto," I finished for him. "I know. I'm in the year below you."

"Huh," he said, and then there was a pause, and a contemplative frown with his face all scrunched up and then one eye cracked back open: "Ah!" he struck one hand with the other fist, and I wondered for a second if this was because he'd heard the word 'Uchiha' before, or if perhaps he thought I was stalking him or something, and then -

"You have to call me sempai!" he burst out, grinning.

Sorry,  _what_?

I opened my mouth to protest - I was  _fifteen years_  his senior. Then I closed it. Obviously I couldn't say that. After a second, I opened my mouth again.

"Over  _my dead body_ ," I said flatly.

"Ehh? But I  _am_ ," he pointed out.

"No."

There is the kind of no that you can grind down to a reluctant 'ugh, okay,' and then there is  _no_. Naruto, as you might have gathered from reading the manga, did not believe in the latter kind.

"Saaaayyy it," he poked me. Again.

He kept  _going_.

Finally my nerve broke. I smacked one hand over his mouth for silence, only flinching a little when he immediately licked it; ew, ew,  _ew_. "You can be my sempai," I said, which made him stop wriggling and making muffled noises, "if you pass the graduation exam before I do."

There was a moment's silence and I cautiously removed my hand and wiped it on my pants. Gross, Naruto.

He just blinked. "I'm already a year ahead of you! That's easy."

"Then you'll have no problem doing it... right?" I raised my eyebrows at him.

He blinked again "Of course!"

"Fine then." I sped up, but I wasn't trying to get away from Naruto so it didn't matter when he followed suit.

"Are you always this early?" he wondered, looking around the mostly-empty academy grounds. It was adjacent to the Hokage's offices, so it was never truly empty, but it seemed silent when there were only a few students around.

"Pretty much," I nodded.

"Why?" he asked, as though he couldn't fathom wanting to spend any more time in the academy than he had to.

"Because," I said, and then a wail interrupted me. " _That_ ," I said with mounting dread.

"Sasuke-kuuun!" Ino zoomed forward and attached herself to my arm. "Are you going to class now? Oho, you're so studious to get here early! Will you sit with me?"

"Eh? Eh?" Naruto looked from my face to Ino and back. "I... Is she your...?" his voice trailed off uncertainly. After a second, he held up a fist, one pinky extended.

"I never really liked you, Naruto," Ino said cheerfully, "but I guess I'm willing to overlook that. You may not be such a bad guy."

" _No_ ," I said emphatically.

"He's just shy," she said blithely, clinging tighter. " _Sasuke-kun_ ," she cooed, rubbing her cheek on my arm. Oh god. Oh,  _god_. 

"Hai, hai," drawled a weary voice, and then one of Shikaku's hands shot out of  _nowhere_  and grabbed her by the arm. "It's too early to be so loud, Ino-chan," he said, turning and drawing her away.

"...So..." Naruto gave me a really confused look.

" _No_ ," I repeated. "She's just - she's a person who's invested in the idea of liking somebody, and  _I have no idea_  why she picked me, but she did and now she's everywhere," I said darkly.

Naruto gave me a dubious look, which was kind of ugly and squinty on him.

"Sasuke-kun!" that was Sakura's voice. Why were they all so early? Another cry joined hers. Oh no.

Naruto's suspicious look began to morph into laughter at my panicked expression. "Are you  _serious_? You're scared of a bunch of girls?"

"Um," I said, thinking fast.

Then I grabbed Naruto by the arm and hurled him into them, sending all three of the preteens tumbling.

"Eh! BASTARD -!" Naruto's voice soared.

Discretion being the better part of valour, I fled. Oh, how I fled.

I was absolutely certain that Naruto would fail his exam this year, but I kept an eye on him anyway. He was the protagonist, after all. Still, there was no reason to worry that I'd ever have to call him 'sempai', since I'd not really changed any of the things that made classes harder for him... and also because I  _was_  paying attention, and I saw how very many classes he skipped to go hooliganning about the village.

I spent a lot of that year feeling sick, to be absolutely honest: faintly queasy, restless, jittery, hot and cold by turns, dry-mouthed, a little dizzy... all symptoms of mild, controlled poisoning.

My classes with Suzume-sensei slowly but steadily turned into drills: grind this, mash this, coat this. How do you treat fireblossom seeds before exposure? What are the six most common plant-based poisons to cause paralysis? Where are they found? What does it mean, if you're past the northern border and a team mate shows these symptoms?

Suzume was manipulative and fastidious and I didn't actually  _like_  her very much, but I could see why she'd been assigned to the academy for so long. She was a relentless teacher. She'd been right, too, when she deceived me: I learned my lesson. Suffering was a good teacher.

I certainly never trusted her - or anybody else - to mix my poisons again.

While the practice of mithridatism meant that I was capable of exposing myself to incapacitating quantities of my own poisons, it made me sick and tired more often than not, which certainly didn't help my taijutsu ranking - or my temper, actually . I think I made more well-meaning young ladies cry that year than Sasuke had in canon, which...

Well, I probably had a well-deserved reputation for being cranky.

Even so, I hadn't figured out how to make peace with my admirers. Happily I was rather less "cool" than I might have been. My reports and records all said things like 'middling in taijutsu, no ninjutsu to speak of' and they didn't leave anybody labouring under the delusion that I'd be the top rookie any time soon, after all.

I'd _never_ be what Sasuke was supposed to be.

Sometimes that bothered me, and I wondered what I might do to the story. 

But most of the time... for all that Sasuke made a mess of things, he was really very peripheral to the actual conflicts going on around him - even if many of them were  _about_ him, and his family, and his stupid fucking eyes.

The longer I lingered, the more I got sucked into his life and the more I settled into patterns of behaviour and thought that would once have been foreign to me. You'd think I might have benefited from a greater sense of perspective and more foreknowledge, but mostly it just made me very aware that almost everybody wanted something from me... and very few of them were going to take no for an answer.

Sometimes I felt as though I could almost see the patterns of intention around me: everybody else's plans for this small, vulnerable body of mine. Sometimes I felt suffocated by the weight of all that expectation: Itachi, waiting for me to track him down and murder him, make him a footnote in a secret history; Orochimaru, quiet and watchful from across the border, waiting for a weakness he could exploit; and then Obito and Madara and Danzo and -

The possibility that I might one day wake the sharingan really, truly frightened me.

I didn't want to be Sasuke. I didn't want to be a vehicle for the Uchiha clan. I wanted to be  _me_.

In a way I was grateful for Naruto, no matter how irritating I found him, because he was an antidote to that terror. One person, at least, wasn't looking at me and weighing up power or honour or blood or pounds of flesh. When Naruto looked at me I could be absolutely certain that all he saw was a kind of weird eleven year old kid with dark eyes who lived in the haunted house at the end of the road.

It became rapidly apparent that Naruto had no friends, and equally rapidly apparent that he desperately needed them. Even I, who was vastly uninterested in ninety percent of his rambling conversation, seemed like good company to him.

Maybe I wasn't a very  _good_  friend, but upon my discovery of just how starved for company Naruto was, I was determined to at least not push him away completely. He and Sasuke were friends later, anyway, so -

\- Well, no.

But I didn't really  _want_  a rival.

Being friends was... Ugh. Had I always been so  _bad_  at it?

It was difficult. I was awkward. I was't eleven. I couldn't...  _play_ , the way he could. Have you ever listened to a preteen talk? They chatter. They ramble. I'm sure, to their own ears, they scintillate. To me they just sounded like they were talking fucking gibberish, wheeling and careening in no logically discernable pattern when they made these -  _noises_ , with their mouths.

Naruto was  _worse._

His sense of humour was aggressively juvenile, and when he wasn't making a nuisance of himself with practical jokes - frequently just making a mess for somebody else to clean up, really - he was cheerfully extolling the virtues of miso ramen or yelling about ninja skills that I was almost certain he didn't actually have yet.

Honestly, hanging around with Naruto was even more like babysitting than interacting with other people in my class was. When I wasn't fighting the urge to smack him in the face and make him  _shut up_ , I wanted to  _shake him_ and yell YOU ARE STUPID. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE at the top of my lungs until it sunk in.

In short, he needed a mother almost as much as he needed a friend, and I was  _determined_  that I would not be his substitute for maternal affection.

Sometimes I found myself eyeing his dirty clothes or contemplating precisely how much ramen he ate and I panicked about the thought.

_I was too young and way too Sasuke to be his mother._

This horrible feeling came to a head on a temperate day (all days were temperate in Konoha, actually), upon which I was magnanimously allowing Naruto to spar - which was to say, he hadn't actually given me much of a choice, since he'd just, you know, kind of hurled himself at me while I was running.

"A shinobi must be prepared for a surprise attack!" he yelled cheerfully when I protested, and then launched himself at me again.

It was when we were done, tired and filthy - and me having cut my run short when I was accosted - that I peered over at him from my undignified sprawl on the ground, and noticed the uneven edge of a zip where it was peeling away from the fabric of Naruto's jumper.

"I can sew that back in," I murmured tiredly, nodding vaguely at it.

He squinted at me, then sat up and examined his zip. "Huh," he said. Then he looked back at me as we both got to our feet and made a half-hearted effort to dust ourselves off. "...did _Suzume-sensei_ teach you that?" he asked, grinning.

I blinked, opened my mouth to point out that  _everybody_  knew how to freaking sew, but...

He was right. What was I  _thinking?_ A terrifying, and frankly irrational, premonition told me that I'd be doing his laundry and packing him boxed lunches next.

Nope.

No-ope.

So I blinked at him once more and then punched him in the face.

"Fine," I said calmly, and turned on my heel to go home.

"HEY - WHAT THE HELL?" Naruto's muffled bellow came behind me. I, of course, ignored him.

By the end of the first month of our acquaintance, I'd been hauled to Ichiraku Ramen no less than twelve times. At the year's end, I was starting to develop a nervous tick in response to the word 'ramen' - which was unfortunate, because it was one of Naruto's favourite topics.

I realised that this was a problem when I went for a run one morning. I jogged past the market district and heard the sounds of Ichiraku opening, but didn't look that way - not until Ayame stuck her head out and called, "Hello, Sasuke-kun," to me in her sweet friendly voice.

"I - hello," I said back automatically.

"Train hard, ne?" she beamed.

I didn't have a response for her, so I just kept going. I might have sped up.

Apparently I was on a friendly first-name terms with _the ramen stand lady?_

"No," I said, when Naruto tried to haul me to Ichiraku after class. "No, come on, I feel like I've eaten nothing but ramen for a year."

"So?" he asked cheerfully, grabbing my arm and pulling me off balance.

There were six or seven ways to break his hold and at least three ways to dump him on his butt in the dirt, and I considered all of these possibilities for a second. Naruto's taijutsu was so much sloppier that I could probably drop him without even hurting him, which sat well with me.

Instead, I dug my heels in and just refused to move. That was the good part about being in a body that was biologically male - I rarely had to worry about being physically weaker than any other person my size.

" _You_  might be able to survive on nothing but miso ramen, but I need food with actual nutritional value."

Naruto scowled. "There's nutritional value in ramen!"

I eyed him. "Then  _you_  can go eat ramen," I told him. "I'm not." I'd cook something. Something with vegetables. And maybe eggs? And if Naruto wasn't going to be there, it'd be quiet.

He looked torn. "But -"

But I was warming to the idea of a Naruto-free evening.

It didn't take a lot of encouragement to get him more interested in ramen than me. Once he'd gone racing off toward Ichiraku, I let out a half-breath of relief and stood still on the academy grounds for a few seconds.

Naruto was probably good for me, sure. But he was  _exhausting_.

"Ne, Uchiha-kun," said Mizuki-sensei, who had come up behind us at some point. I was very proud of the way I didn't twitch. He walked really quietly.

I turned to him. "Mm?"

"That kid..."

I stilled. I hadn't  _forgotten_  Mizuki-sensei's role in Naruto finding out about the kyuubi but... Well, I had kind of pushed it to the back of my mind. It was irrelevant to my day to day life, after all. But now with his brown eyes on Naruto's retreating back, I could almost feel the impending conflict.

I didn't really like it.

I didn't really like  _Naruto_  a lot of the time, to be honest, but I did feel kind of protective of him. He was just - he such a _huge, giant, naive **dork**_? I, at least, knew that almost everybody around me was plotting something for or against me, and that all of these plots had the sharingan at their centre.

He... didn't even know that the kyuubi was still alive. Not yet. 

And I could hardly tell him.

"What about him?" I said in a voice that probably came out a little too hard.

Mizuki-sensei's eyes sharpened as they moved from Naruto's back to me, and something tightened around his eyes.

"Just worried about you, is all," he said carefully. I was pretty sure that wasn't what he'd been intending to say. "He's not a very good student. He might be a bad influence."

I made an unflattering grunting noise, unsure what else to say. He _was_  a terrible student, and he probably would be a bad influence on anybody he befriended.

"Ne, ne, Sasuke-kun~" Came a cry across the school yard, and I cringed.

Mizuki blinked once, and then his lips twitched. "Ah, Yamanaka-san," he said, casually corralling Ino and attracting Inoichi's attention. "I wanted to discuss your daughter's progress..."

Gratefully, I fled the scene.

Despite being relatively less popular than Sasuke had been in the manga timeline, it seemed like I was stuck with Sakura and Ino. As far as I could tell, their rivalry was really only about me in the sense that I provided something for them to compete about.

The only other kids my physical age that I spent time with were Chouji and Shikamaru - mostly because Chouji was by far the most bearable of the kids in my year. He came as a matched set with Shikamaru, which was...

Something.

Shikamaru was a bit of an enigma, and I wasn't sure if I liked him.

Our breaks at the academy were often spent sitting beneath a broad tree whose branches sprawled wide enough for sunlight to shine between. Luckily for me, Naruto was still the year above us, and took his break at a different time.  _Thank god_.

We were a pretty peaceful bunch, provided I could worm my way away from Ino and Sakura. Chouji ate his lunch (it was a large lunch) and Shikamaru napped or gazed up at the clouds.

Sometimes, when I felt guilty for being unproductive during the break, I spent the time attaching and detaching leaves from my arms with my chakra.

"You spend a lot of time practicing," Shikamaru yawned at one point, "for somebody who can't actually use ninjutsu."

How he'd deduced that I spent a great deal of time doing tedious chakra control exercises - since I only did them occasionally during breaks at the academy - remained mysterious to me, but he was right.

That was one of those suspicious, enigmatic things about Shikamaru: just when I was beginning to really suspect he was actually some kind of lower life-form descended from a particularly apathetic species of slug, he... came forth with some quick, lightning crack of insight. He was clever, but more importantly he was _detached_ ; approval didn't touch him, punishment didn't faze him; he was unmoved alike by affection and contempt. In a way - a fucked up, sociopathic way - he actually embodied the ninja ideal much better than any number of this generation's so-called genius ninja.

"I'm practicing so I can _learn_ ninjutsu," I said.

Shikamaru's dark eyes flicked to me for a second, and I looked back as blankly as I could. I wasn't sure how successful I was. Next to Shikamaru, Chouji chomped down on a potato chip.

"Sounds like a lot of work," said Shikamaru, turning his face back to the clouds.

"It is," I said, scowling. And not the kind of heart-pounding, hard-sweating work that made you feel like you'd achieved something, either. It was tedious and frustrating and long.

Sasuke - the original Sasuke, the one who was supposed to be here - had a temperament like a goddamn battering ram. Me? I was more of a flow-around-the-obstacles kind of person.

Honestly, at least half of the reason I'd stuck at it so long was because I dreaded Hyuuga-sensei's response if I didn't meet the expectations he'd set for my improvement. Nobody could do towering disdain like Hyuuga-sensei. The part where he was a rare specimen of his clan with a sense of humour actually just made it worse. (It wasn't a very nice sense of humour.)

The rest of my motivation was the spectre of war hanging over Konoha, and, by extension, over me. 

So I threw myself into training with a fierceness that would have astonished anybody who actually knew me as a lazy university student. I felt as though I had an hourglass inside my head, and each fallen grain of sand meant the time when I would need every skill I had was coming closer.

Naruto failed his graduation.

Of course he did.

He was depressed for a little while, of course he was, but he bounced back like a poorly-aimed rubber band and by the next day it was "I'LL PASS NEXT TIME," and "JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE," and "I'M GONNA BE THE BEST HOKAGE!" until my head hurt.

Teuchi and Ayame, bless their souls, were much better equipped to handle his... excitement.

"That's the spirit, Naruto-kun," said Teuchi, slipping in an extra bowl I was sure we hadn't ordered. Naruto didn't notice - he'd ordered so many already that I was sure the arrival of more ramen just seemed like part of the natural order to him - but I certainly did.

Teuchi winked at me when he caught my gaze.

"Hmm," I said by way of response, and I lowered my eyes and didn't comment.

The next year, Naruto, Sakura  _and_  Ino were all in my class and any reprieve I might have felt using classes as a way to escape them was a happy memory. With Naruto perched firmly on one side of me and Ino or Sakura battling viciously for supremacy on the other, I felt like I was edging ever closer to some kind of nervous breakdown.

Ino and Naruto and Sakura all seemed like they  _hated_  one another and I hadn't the foggiest idea of what to do about it. Naruto really, really should not have hated Sakura. I didn't understand. I felt... nervous.

"You don't think Sakura's, uh, pretty or something?" I asked Naruto at one point, having pulled him away from the rest of the class during a break.

"Sakura?" he asked, boggling at me. He looked like somebody had smacked him in the face with a wok.

"Well, she's very, um, clever," I suggested, staring hopefully at him.

"Sasuke... you  _like_  Sakura?" there was a pause, "...you like  _Sakura_?"

I covered my eyes with my hands. "No," I said in defeat, "not even a little bit."

This conversation left Naruto very confused and me deeply concerned by how much I'd apparently affected the relationships between other characters. It probably showed in my temper, because even Chouji noticed I was grim.

"Class is almost over," he said consolingly at one lunch. "And we've got ninjutsu next. Aren't you going to see Suzume-sensei?"

"Not Suzume-sensei," I sighed. I wished I was going to see Suzume-sensei, she of the languid eyes and manipulative-as-hell brain. As I got older and she began to treat me a little more like an adult, she was actually kind of growing on me.

(Slowly.

Like a fungus.)

Unfortunately, I was not going to see her today. I was going to see Hyuuga-sensei. He, as usual, would doubtless stare at me with his unreadable eyes and make slow, disdainful comments about my chakra.

I sunk deeper into my black mood.

Chouji poked me with a chip, but I did not respond and eventually he gave up. Shikamaru, perhaps unsurprisingly, never tried to draw me out of it.

Still, I hadn't been keeping up my chakra practice just to then avoid ever finding out about my rate of improvement and future prospects, so I did actually attend my appointment with the chakra specialist - although I don't think anybody would have mistaken my attitude for enthusiasm.

Hyuuga-sensei's soft voice did very little to hide his towering disdain for me and my relative lack of chakra skills.

"You will never have perfect chakra control," he said, yet again. "If you maintain your current rate of improvement," he said 'improvement' as though he wasn't sure it was the right word but didn't have another one, "you'll be able to attempt D-rank jutsu at some point next year."

Next  _year_?

In canon, Sasuke had learned chidori within the next year.

Oh, I was  _screwed_.

I swallowed. "Right," I said softly.

"You might be able to master an E-rank jutsu without losing consciousness soon," he added dismissively, "so there's a large chance you'll pass the graduation exam."

"Oh," I nodded my head. "Good."

He waited impatiently for me to leave, and then, when I sat there staring at my hands for a few moments too long, he added: "Was there anything else?"

"I - no."

And I got up and left without even thanking him. I was so screwed.


	7. Chapter 7

If anybody had looked in on me over the next couple of days - and who knows, they may well have - they would have been exposed to the very strange sight of Uchiha Sasuke frantically engaged in handicrafts.

I admit it, I was stressed.

Hyuuga-sensei's assessment haunted me. What if I _couldn't_ graduate?

The list of how many future events that would screw up was very long and I didn't like thinking about it. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible _not_ to think about it.

Embroidered cushions piled up until I ran out of stuffing. I mostly did designs of leaves and vines: intricate, curling, soothing patterns that didn't require absolute perfection. In my experience, if a design is detailed enough you can get by with an occasional dodgy stitch.

When I found myself with a half-stuffed cushion and nothing with which to fill it, I realised it was perhaps time to do something else.

I still hadn't calmed down enough to focus on my chakra control exercises though, and the rest of my homework was pretty much done - in trying to keep up with Sasuke's reputation for academic smarts, I'd outsmarted myself and left myself with no really good distraction for my thoughts.

I ended up in the kitchen. Green tea flavoured rice flour bread - sweet, and really nothing like bread - occurred at some point, and I found a recipe kicking around in Mikoto's old book that was for sweet rice dumplings. The page was dog-eared and she'd scribbled a faded _for Itachi-chan_ on the top of it.

I made them, too, all the while wondering if she'd considered he might be the one to kill her.

It was a morbid thought, but it wasn't about me, and that distance made it much more tolerable than thinking about the problem with which I was actually faced.

In a weird way, I was in the same situation as Naruto. I knew he'd fail to graduate - at least at first - because he couldn't create a proper clone.

And neither could I.

Hyuuga-sensei had seemed to think that learning more than one E-rank jutsu would be impossible for me right now. That might be true, but...

The way around that was something I'd been aware of for some time: genjutsu could replace two of the basic E-rank jutsu taught in the academy. I'd be on my own for learning the rope-untying technique and the replacement technique, but there seemed like a good chance I'd actually be able to learn how to make clones and produce a transformation.

That would be it, then. I'd have to find somebody to teach me, and then I'd have to hope that I wasn't terrible at it.

I knew Mizuki-sensei wouldn't teach me anything about genjutsu if he could possibly help it - I'd had that conversation with him enough to be going on with, thank you very much. Iruka-sensei was an option, but I didn't know him very well at all and I wasn't sure if I wanted to risk Naruto's knee-jerk envy if I ended up spending time outside class with Iruka. Naruto had proven to be oddly possessive of his friends, although I was hoping it'd become less apparent as we all got a bit older.

But still. For now... maybe not.

After a lot of cooking and some internal debate, I reluctantly decided that Suzume-sensei was the best to ask.

That did not mean I wanted to ask her.

I rubbed a smear of flour into my forehead and looked around, which was when I realised that my back hurt from leaning over and that most of the surfaces in my kitchen were covered with food.

"...what the hell am I going to do with all this?" I muttered.

Oh, well. I was sure I could find somebody to eat it. Good food shouldn't go to waste, after all.

* * *

In hindsight, bringing a separate container of food for Chouji was a _terrible_ idea.

I mean, no, it was a great idea - Chouji liked food, and he had a bunch of family techniques that required he consume huge numbers of calories to convert to chakra at need. Bringing my excess food for him was perfectly fine and logical.

A person might think that being surrounded by pubescent kids all the time would have given me some insight into their culture and behaviours but that person would have been _wrong_.

"Ah," I said when our class was dismissed for lunch, "Chouji, wait a second."

He stopped and turned, squinting comically at me over the desks. "Hmm?"

Shikamaru paused, leaning on one of the desks as the other kids filtered out around us. He watched me digging through my bag for a second and then a rare look of alarm crossed his face. "Sasuke, maybe you-"

"I cooked too much, so-"

There was a scream.

I froze. Chouji froze. Iruka-sensei, talking to Hinata down the front of the classroom, put a hand on her shoulder and drew her closer, looking around wildly.

Shikamaru, face twisted in a grimace, rubbed the bridge of his nose like he already had a headache.

I looked around. "What-?"

Ino snatched the lunch box from Chouji's hand, which was about when I realised my mistake. Chouji still just looked confused.

The next thing I heard was somebody screaming: "-SASUKE-KUN'S BENTO OF LOVE!"

Fucking _Ino_.

I opened my mouth.

Then I closed it.

Shikamaru heaved a huge, put-upon sigh and sank back down to his chair.

"I KNEW IT," bellowed Kiba.

"You didn't _know it_ ," hissed Ami, " _you_ said he liked Shikamaru!"

I glanced sideways at Shikamaru. He cracked a huge yawn.

"Well, who the hell would pick _Chouji_ ," said Kiba, and Akamaru gave an agreeable bark. I could see from the look on Chouji's face that he'd heard that.

I hurled a textbook at him, because, well _fucking rude,_ Kiba. It hit him in the shoulder and nearly dislodged Akamaru from his head. "Hey, what the hell!"

Somebody else laughed. "Sorry, Sasuke- _kun_ , I'm sure he didn't mean to offend your _boyfrie-_ "

" _THEY'RE NOT BOYFRIENDS_ ," snarled Sakura from somewhere, clearly having lost all control over Inner Sakura. There was a crash.

I looked at my hands.

"But the _bento_!" somebody else cried, and -

"Desk," Shikamaru said, prompting both Chouji and I to duck as one of the classroom desks went sailing overhead, a casualty in the minor war that was breaking out all around us.

"Wait," said Naruto, squinting around. A little slow on the uptake, that boy. "Why did you bring _him_ food?"

"Because there's no ramen," I muttered.

"Oh," said Naruto. Then he rubbed his chin and nodded sagely. "That makes sense." Then: "Chouji _does_ like food. Does that mean you and he -?" he crooked a pinky finger at me, a gesture I'd never quite figured out even though I did now understand the significance of it.

"No," I muttered.

"You're _sure_? It wouldn't be bad if you were, 'cause, you know -"

"I am not dating Chouji. I'm not dating _anyone_." Not least because they were all tiny pubescent children and despite that Sasuke's body was growing and changing day by day, I still felt intellectually like some kind of monster when I considered any of his age mates in a sexual or romantic light.

Chouji's face was bright red.

"I'm so sorry," I muttered, covering my face with my hands.

"It's -" I was pretty sure he was about to say 'fine', except unfortunately Ino grabbed him by the scarf and hauled him into the melee.

"Sasuke-kun," Sakura appeared out of nowhere between Shikamaru and I, having somehow stretched time and space to insinuate herself. Replacement technique? Shunshin? I could not tell. "You're not _really_ dating Chouji, are you? You just, uh, you noticed he was always hungry and brought more food! From the goodness of your heart. Right? Sasuke-kun?"

I squinted at her. The goodness of my heart.

"I cooked too much," I said. It sounded lamer and lamer the more I said it.

"SASUKE-KUN," Ino bellowed, appearing in a puff of smoke that was, actually, _definitely_ the replacement technique because she was suddenly where a chair had been a moment ago.

She plopped the case of food, recently opened, on the desk in front of me, and she leaned in and stared into my eyes like some kind of fierce and terrible bird of prey. "Did you cook this?" she hissed.

I looked down at the case.

Sweet buns with red bean paste, little mochi - making the rice into the paste had been _very_ therapeutic - the green tea rice flour breads, the dumplings Mikoto had earmarked for Itachi -

It wasn't even properly _lunch_ , not really, because it was all mercilessly sweet. There was no cutesy furikake or adorable rice balls. It didn't look like something made by a stereotypical teenaged girl in love. Because it _wasn't_.

It was all just the sweets I'd pulled out and packed when I realised I wouldn't be able to eat them all myself.

Naruto leaned over and yanked out a dumpling with his fingers.

" _Naruto_!" Ino's voice was scandalised.

"What?" he said, through a mouthful of food. "Hey, these are pretty good," he added thoughtfully. "I mean, it's not ramen, but -"

"You can't eat that! That's Sasuke's _bento_ he made for _Chouji_ specially!"

"I'm pretty sure he just thought Chouji had the highest chance of eating it all," Shikamaru drawled, barely audible above the noise of arguing children.

"QUIET," bellowed Iruka, red-faced and glowering.

Slowly but surely, silence descended. Iruka was terrifying when he was angry.

Once he had silence and order, he swiftly and with astonishing certainty assigned detentions and extra work to the kids who'd been the source of the most chaos - which was startling in that the list did not include Naruto for a change.

Then, after the grumbling and aggrieved protests had died down, he stalked over and confiscated the case of food.

Iruka-sensei's voice turned sweet as honey for a second when he spoke to me: "These look very nice, Sasuke-kun. I'm sure you won't mind if I leave them in the staff room instead."

I shook my head mutely.

He gave a benign smile to Chouji, Shikamaru and I - one which Ino was not included in, I noticed - and turned on his heel to face the rest of the class again. "Lunch," he said shortly, in a glacial tone. " _Outside_."

The whole class scrambled to obey.

"For a genius," drawled Shikamaru, sitting slumped against the base of a tree ten minutes later - ten minutes, because we'd had to creatively lose the rest of the class and it had been horrible, "you're not really very smart, are you?"

"Who said I was a genius?" I muttered, prodding at my own lunch. It was pretty much the same as the box I'd had confiscated, except I'd replaced some of the sweets with food that had a larger proportion of actual nutrients: fish, leafy green vegetables.

"You're in the top half of the class scores, even though your taijutsu sucks and you can't perform ninjutsu," Shikamaru said, sounding horribly bored. "It's been said."

Ridiculous. I'd worked my butt off to be good at the ninja stuff I could actually do, and I'd learned with the adaptability of a child and the mentality of an adult with a tertiary qualification.

The original Sasuke, bless his tormented little socks, wasn't even much of a genius. He trained hard and he had a lot of potential - potential that I certainly hadn't matched.

I had to stop comparing myself to him. I was _never_ going to be that good, and hopefully I was never going to make that many terrible, colossal mistakes either. I was not going to be Sasuke.

Well, other than the name.

And the body.

Dammit.

I stabbed a piece of fish violently with my chopstick. "I'm not a genius," I muttered.

"I'd noticed," drawled Shikamaru sleepily.

Chouji ate his chips. He was very quiet and I hoped I hadn't traumatised him.

The next morning when Inoichi propelled Ino toward the classroom and unslung a dozing Shikamaru from his shoulder, he frowned at me.

"You can't date Chouji until he's thirty, either," he informed me darkly.

Chouji, with one shoulder trapped beneath Inoichi's heavy hand, looked distinctly uncomfortable.

I blinked once, slowly. "...I'll keep that in mind?"

"But the mochi were very good," he added, breaking out into a grin.

I felt my face begin to heat. Of _course_ everybody knew what had happened. Iruka-sensei had no doubt shared his story along with his excess of food.

This became even more apparent when Inuzuka Hana, dragging her protesting brother to school by the hair, gave me a fanged smile and informed me that if the ninja business didn't work out for me I could always open a bakery.

I ducked into the classroom and hid behind Naruto. At least _he'd_ pretty much forgotten by then.

* * *

"You're a surprisingly good cook," Suzume-sensei said later that day, in her usual no-nonsense tone. "There was almost nothing left when I made it to the chuunin lounge last night."

I wasn't sure what to say, so I said nothing. I was going to be turning her ingredients into usable poisons again, which meant I had to concentrate anyway.

She eyed me sideways. "It's usually women who bake when they're stressed."

Great. I had been annoyed by the misinterpretation of my motives, but now I was wondering how many of the adults who'd heard about it had _correctly_ guessed what was going on. Suzume-sensei had the advantage of knowing me, at least...

"Does it matter?" I asked shortly, on the end of a sigh.

"No," she said, after a considering pause. "Not really." Then: "Sasuke, I know that this has all been a bit of a joke, but... if it _were_ a boy, it wouldn't bother anybody."

That she had to tell me that said different, I thought, but I knew better than to point it out. I said nothing.

She hummed gently, and together we got started.

I didn't ask her about genjutsu that lesson.

That took the better part of a week, and when I finally worked up the nerve she actually seemed surprised.

"Can't you use the sharingan?" She looked at me over the top of her glasses.

I was, once again, grinding strychnine. It was laborious work, but this time I had an incentive. This time, after preparing Suzume-sensei's supplies for her, I could keep anything left to grind.

The idea of having deadly poison at my fingertips was both exciting and terrifying.

"You'll graduate in a few months," she'd drawled when I'd given her an alarmed look. "You're going to have to start carrying your own, or there's no point. And as for handling..." her eyes crinkled, just a little, at the edges when she smiled. "Nothing beats a lethal poison for teaching children to be careful."

That statement pretty much summed up Suzume-sensei's approach to teaching in general. In a way, it seemed like she was wasted on teaching young kunoichi how to arrange flowers and pass coded messages to one another.

Still, despite my excitement and her fairly logical reasoning, I was still a little worried. Some of these things were hard to build resistance to, and honestly strychnine poisoning was a bad way to die.

"Not yet," I hedged in response to her question, without looking up from my seeds. I really, really did not want to get the sharingan. It was dangerous to use and dangerous to have. And at least I knew that if I never developed it. Orochimaru would never want me. Defeating Itachi wasn't my goal and I didn't have to be as strong as he was - hopefully.

"Hmm," she said. Then she rubbed her nose. "You just want to duplicate the clone technique with a genjutsu?"

"I want to understand enough to learn simple ones. Just the basics, really."

"You've got the chakra thing, though." She looked dubious. She tugged at her luxurious hair, peering at me like she could see something I didn't want her to. "You're sure you're not going to collapse or anything?"

"Hyuuga-sensei said not," I said, which wasn't entirely true. The doctors at the hospital had suggested I try genjutsu because it used the kind of energy I had in abundance, not because they were sure I wouldn't get hurt.

Suzume-sensei heaved a sigh. "Fine," she agreed. "Basics only, and if you still manage to flunk the graduation test after all the work I've put into you-"

"As if I would," I said, with a great deal more confidence than I actually had in myself.

She straightened her glasses, propped the swell of her hip against the edge of the table, and eyed me. "You'll finish that up early, then."

I nodded and tried to grind faster. It wasn't really effective, and in the end each phial took just as much time and effort as the previous ones, but after I'd completed the safe cleanup procedures I'd been drilled in (and drilled in, and drilled in, because Suzume-sensei was a relentless taskmaster and also she _had no soul_ ), Suzume-sensei examined my work and nodded.

"You're probably all right to work with these familiar plant-based poisons now, although I don't want you experimenting without me present. Now," she added, sweeping a dark ringlet over her shoulder. "Genjutsu."

The reason they don't teach genjutsu to academy kids, I decided, was because it was _bloody complicated_.

It required a mind set that allowed the user to sort of gently work around a person's perceptions and assumptions, building them into illusions as they went. It also had to be done in such a way that the brain didn't notice and immediately reject a user's genjutsu - when that happened, a ninja got a sudden chemical rush of adrenalin and it was pretty distinctive. Half the battle in breaking an illusion was knowing it was one, after all.

My endless practice at chakra control, at least, had paid off a little here: it only took me a week or so to learn how to trick people into thinking there was more than one of me. It wasn't _quite_ the same as the clone technique, because I had to be aware of the people watching me - instead of building a form out of chakra that bent light to give the impression of an extra body, my technique operated on the people watching.

"That's going to make it more difficult to use in the field," Suzume-sensei informed me, "but you'll definitely be able to use it to pass the graduation exam. The transformation technique is going to be more difficult."

It _was_ , too. It was simple enough to cast a genjutsu that made people think of you as somebody from their past or their memory: a vaguely familiar face, dismissed out of hand. It relied on triggering certain ideas that were pretty much the same in all people.

But each person had a very different relationship and different mental associations with any _specific_ person.

Iruka-sensei, for example, was different to me than he was to Naruto, and he would be different again to Sakura. Ninja, trained to notice details, would very likely pick out bits and pieces that didn't quite match _their_ perception of Iruka-sensei, and that would in turn trigger suspicion.

"Even if you got it perfect," Suzume-sensei said to me eventually, puzzled and a little frustrated, as I stood before her trying with all my might to project the image of the Hokage, "I don't think it would be perfect for anybody else."

We'd colonised one of the empty class rooms after hours and the rest of the building was eerily empty. The tower was next door, and it never really stopped buzzing, but here, in the class rooms at the academy? Silence reigned. It was weird.

I released the genjutsu and ran my hands through my hair.

"I think when you have the sharingan you'll be able to," she said slowly, tapping her chin. "I didn't work with many members of your clan - missions like mine have handlers, not combat teams, and most of the Uchiha were combat specialists." She looked at me as though that was something of a surprise, like I wasn't at all what she'd expected.

I shifted uncomfortably. I probably wasn't. I wasn't what I'd expected, either.

"But I understand that many of the genjutsu that require the sharingan aren't really regular genjutsu. Certainly when the military police were called to a disturbance they'd be able to render grown shinobi unconscious without a fight..." she rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Well, usually _drunk_ grown shinobi, to be fair, but..."

I raised my eyebrows, wondering if that was something she'd really intended to say aloud.

Eventually, though, she shook herself out of it. "It may be worth showing the examiners that you _can_ transform your appearance to match some expectations, even if you can't create the transformation technique itself. It's still a ninja skill, and it's arguably more useful."

I nodded, frowning, but it was still a little disappointing.

But there was one academy technique that could not be even partially replaced with genjutsu, and that was the replacement technique. _That_ was the one ninjutsu I was really concentrating on learning.

My first attempt saw me sitting in a heap across the room from where I'd started, staring at nothing for a good thirty minutes while my charka figured out what was going on. Learning it was hard going, and involved a lot of headaches, frustration and occasional nose bleeds.

On the up side, by the time it came to graduation, I could replace myself once every six minutes with only a lingering headache to show for it. That was what I called progress.

* * *

Despite being fairly confident that I'd pass, I still felt unaccountably nervous on the day of the final part of the graduation exam. There were other parts - an academic test, a taijutsu round, some obstacle courses and a random assessment of various bits of know-how and skills - but the ninjutsu portion of the exam was the place where we'd learn how well or poorly we'd done in all the other sections, and how our scores averaged out.

They weren't a direct average, but rather the sections were weighted in some arcane way that landed us all on a bell curve within the cohort. Naruto, I knew, was somewhere down the bottom end. In the canon time line, Sasuke had been right at the top.

I admit, I was a _little_ nervous.

From the chatter in the class room, it seemed like I wasn't the only one: Naruto was especially loud, and got into a argument with Kiba about whether or not he'd be Hokage one day. Sakura and Ino were bickering over who got the seat next to me, and their fighting had risen to knew heights of delicate viciousness. All across the room voices were raised, and everything was louder and pitched higher than usual.

Shikamaru was two seats ahead, slumped obliviously on his desk, and looking at him provided me with a sense of calm. Next to him, Chouji ate his crisps with a terrible scowl and a fierce determination.

It seemed to take forever for my name to be called, but when it was I wasn't sure that I wanted to go at all.

Which was stupid, obviously. I got up and stalked toward the door where Mizuki-sensei was smiling benignly at me. It occurred to me, looking at his cheerful face, that tonight was the night he'd trick Naruto into stealing the scroll.

His brow furrowed at my expression, and I wondered what my face looked like.

I blinked once and looked away.

"Nervous, Sasuke-kun?" he asked, closing the door behind us. "Don't be. Your academic results are among the best in the class - this is more like a formality."

I made an acknowledging noise.

"For the ninjutsu portion of the exam," Iruka-sensei said from where he was settled behind a broad wooden desk cluttered with the generic leaf forehead protectors given to genin, "we've gotten permission from Hokage-sama to change the marking system to account for your... medical problem. Since you've been completing extra-curricular classes with Suzume-sensei, we've added twenty per cent of her mark to your total, which partially accounts for your inability in ninjutsu. Do you have any questions about that?"

That meant that whatever mark Suzume gave me out of a hundred, it wouldn't weight very heavily upon the rest of my mark. That was... not unexpected, but disappointing. I shook my head, though. I understood.

"She does write that you can successfully complete the clone technique, though," Iruka went on, glancing down at his notes. "Showing us that would be an opportunity to increase your mark in the ninjutsu section significantly."

I nodded. That, at least, was easy enough. My sequence of hand signs was completely different to the ones they were expecting to see, but the clones that shimmered into place on either side of me were very similar to the proper version of the technique - or they were to me, anyway. Using genjutsu did always make me wonder what other people were seeing.

"I've been working on the replacement," I said, shifting uncertainly when they indicated I could release that technique.

Iruka's eyebrows rose. He flipped through his pages and, after a second, shook his head. "Usually we'd use your performance here to moderate the marks you've already received during the year, but you haven't attended any of the ninjutsu classes this year - anything higher than zero will increase your score."

I nodded seriously.

I took my hands through the seals as quickly as I dared - I'd had a lot of practice at this jutsu recently, but the hand seals were used to control the chakra flow, which meant that I had to be especially careful with them.

 _Tiger, boar, ox, dog, snake_ \- I ran through the names in my head, feeling the organic but indescribable sensation of my chakra shifting.

I released it, finally, and - poof!

Where I had been standing was one of the chairs from the sides of the room, and I, in turn, was able to lean back against the wall where the chair had been.

Iruka smiled. "Congratulations," he said, and picked up a forehead protector to give to me.

I took it carefully. The metal plate was cool and heavy. I blinked at it.

It was... weirdly anticlimactic.

"Don't forget to wear it to the genin meeting, okay?" Iruka said cheerfully.

I nodded, and walked out.

For once, the other students didn't even notice me. I slipped out and headed home, thoughtfully contemplating my forehead protector.

 _Well_ , I thought. _I guess I'm a ninja now_. Sort of, anyway. There was still the meeting, and the genin test.

But that night, when the sounds of chuunin and jounin being called to attention in an emergency distracted me from eating (more) leftovers, I thought of Mizuki-sensei and Naruto.

It was a bittersweet feeling. For all his faults, Mizuki-sensei was a person - human, changeable, full of desires and fears and, well.

He'd been my teacher for a long time and I had harboured some small hope that I might have changed the timeline in some way that would make him abandon this evening's plan - despite how terribly that would have messed other stuff up later on.

But the sound of the alarm confirmed what I'd already known would happen. Mizuki had tricked Naruto, Naruto had stolen the scroll... Well. He'd signed his own life away, really, hadn't he?

I went back to my leftovers and contemplated the genin debrief meeting coming up. It would be interesting to see how it went.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which teams are selected and we meet Kakashi. Sort of.

The genin debrief came. Naruto showed up wearing his forehead protector and I knew I wouldn't see Mizuki again.

My feelings on that were... complicated. I sat in silence for a while trying to untangle them all.

Naruto hadn't deserved what Mizuki had planned for him. Of course he hadn't. But it wasn't exactly a zero sum game, either - there were other outcomes that might have been possible, with intervention. Mizuki's festering dislike could have been picked up on earlier, better assessed - if nothing else, he could have been moved from the academy to the active duty roster. But they'd never performed any assessment of his attitude or psychological wellbeing - or, I assumed they hadn't, because they certainly hadn't tried anything like that with me.

And if they didn't have systems in place to provide psychological assessment or treatment to the tiny orphaned child of what amounted to village nobility, I didn't think they'd have tried with Mizuki - not in the aftermath of the shit show that was the Kyuubi attack.

And they should have, because is hatred of Naruto wasn't just unprofessional - it was also  _obvious_. His co-workers could not possibly have failed to observe it.

There were many scars left from the attack of the Nine Tails that were going untreated, and I sort of thought that a lot of people - Naruto, especially - were getting screwed over by it.

Yeah, I'd had some time to think between graduation and that morning, but my thoughts were typically unmanageable. Stress and anxiety threw me for a loop.

My house was full of baked goods. Again.

I had no one to give them to. Hmm.

Naruto beamed at me when he came in, though, and completely ignored Shikamaru's pointed comment about how only shinobi who'd  _passed_  could attend the meeting.

"He's right, you know," Sakura informed Naruto loftily, eyeing him. "Only graduated genin are allowed to be here."

"What does this look like to you?" Naruto snapped back, leaning close so his hitae-ate was almost in her face. "I'm a genin, too, now!"

"A field promotion, then?" I asked, more to cut through the inevitable argument than for any other reason.

He nodded happily. "Iruka-sensei saw me use another super cool technique and it was  _awesome_  so he gave me his own," he rapped the metal plate over his forehead with his knuckles. "Jealous?" he asked, grinning.

"Why would he be jealous?" snapped Sakura. "We  _all_  have them. We're all proper ninja as of today!"

It was a disappointment but not really a surprise when they both ended up on either side of me, bickering over my head. I sort of wished - not for the first time - that I'd been dropped into Ino's body. At least that way I would have been guaranteed the most laid back team possible.

Also, she did have pretty nice hair. I ignored the arguing and thought instead about whether or not I should try growing my hair out. It would depend, I supposed, on whether it grew out all soft and neat like Itachi's or... you know, like Madara's. I was pretty sure that only Madara could pull off Madara's hair. I fingered my bangs thoughtfully, ignoring the overhead screech of Naruto's voice.

Long hair was a pretty good hiding spot for a lot of things, and it didn't matter so much on long-distance fighters - which was definitely me, all things considered. It was my fervent hope that I would only ever have to engage in enough taijutsu to get some distance.

(Yeah, I thought that was unlikely too. Still, a girl can dream. Or a... A Sasuke can dream.)

Iruka arrived and dropped a huge, heavy folder onto his desk at the front of the room with a resounding  _thump_.

"Good morning," he smiled, once we'd all been startled silent. That was Iruka all over: pleasant voice, big stick. I thought he was a surprisingly good teacher, even if he wasn't always available to help his students out.

He dove right into it though, rattling off teams and names.

"And team seven is Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura and Uchiha Sasuke -"

Really? I frowned.

"Wait, what! Why am I on a team with  _her_?" Naruto demanded, standing up.

"As if anybody wants to be on a team with  _you_ ," Sakura hissed, offended, and she grabbed him by the collar and shoved him back into his seat. I ducked out of the way of her elbow. "-Right, Sasuke-kun?"

She looked at me intently.

"That's enough," said Iruka-sensei, which allowed me to totally avoid answering that. "Naruto, Sakura, you don't get to pick your team. Sasuke, stop making that face. Now, team eight-"

Naruto subsided, muttering some rude things about fan clubs, and I did my level best to completely ignore both of them.

I wasn't sure what I'd expected from the team assignments, but I still felt faintly annoyed. There was basically no chance I'd have ended up separated from Naruto, I assumed - because Kakashi was the only remaining adult in the village who had the sharingan, and therefore had both the capacity to teach me (never mind that I didn't  _want_  anything to do with the sharingan) and the potential to control the fox.

Still, I knew I'd have the opportunity to ask, because...

Well, because we got to sit through every other jounin showing up to collect their students while Kakashi was...

Grieving tragically at the cenotaph, I supposed.

Or, expressed in less diplomatic terms: wallowing in his survivor's guilt and inconveniencing everybody else in his life.

I took a deep breath - it wasn't like being cranky would make him show up any faster. Instead I waited until the classroom had cleared out after lunch as the other jounin showed up and tried to cool my temper. He wasn't even actually  _late_ yet. I was pre-emptively annoyed by something he hadn't even done yet.

It occurred to me that Kakashi was one of the few people who was likely to be able to get under my skin and stay there. He might actually give me hives or something.

Kurenai looked a lot stranger in person than I'd been expecting, but after a second I actually thought she was doing that on purpose. Her clothing was asymmetrical: one sleeve, bandages and fishnets and a tunic made to confuse the eye. Her mouth and eyes stood out from her pale makeup, bright and bloody red.

She showed up at precisely the correct time by the Academy classroom clock, and the only thing she said was: "Team eight."

Asuma was almost the opposite: he was ten minutes late, smelled of smoke, and he loomed huge and broad and muscled in the doorway. He chatted amicably with Iruka, yawned a little, and looked around the whole classroom before he called his own team to come with him. Ino, I noted, did not seem terribly impressed with her teacher.

I didn't recognise most of the other jounin who arrived to collect the students, although I was kind of surprised to see Yamashiro Aoba among them. He was pretty easily recognisable with his spiky hair and completely unnecessary sunglasses.

By the time they'd all come and gone, it was the three of us and Iruka remaining in the classroom. He looked preoccupied with marking, but I decided I was at least rude enough to interrupt. Besides, I wanted to confirm something.

"I thought they usually put the highest scoring student with the lowest so the ability levels across a team averaged out?" I asked.

I was definitely not the highest scoring rookie this year. That was still Shino, although I suspected it could have been Shikamaru if he'd applied himself, like, ever.

"Did Suzume-sensei tell you that?" Iruka asked curiously, peering over his marking at me.

I wondered what the chances were that he'd mention it to her if I said yes. Low. Definitely low. But it wasn't impossible, so I shook my head. "Mizuki."

I regretted it a little when Naruto glowered at nothing and an uncomfortable expression shifted across Iruka's face for a second. Sakura looked between them - she'd clearly noticed something, but she was just as clearly uncertain as to what it was or if she wanted to ask what it had to do with Mizuki. But she wasn't stupid, and it didn't take a genius to notice that Mizuki wasn't here.

"Doesn't that mean that Naruto should be with Shino and Hinata?" she asked, breaking the awkward moment.

Iruka hummed thoughtfully. "That would be traditional," he agreed, "but there are other considerations we make as well - and Hokage-sama has to examine and sign off on any of the new teams, so he's approved all of the assignments this year already." He smiled in a way that was evidently meant to reassure Sakura.

Like recreating the Ino-Shika-Chou dynamic, I decided. If the teams were based on test scores alone, they'd never have all landed on the same team - and team eight would look really stacked on paper, actually. Shino was a solid all-rounder and Kiba had the stamina and survival skills to ace most of the physical assessments. The only reason Hinata hadn't landed at the top of the class, as far as I could tell, was her confusion about the Academy-style taijutsu and her complete lack of aggression.

"But doesn't that mean that  _our_  team is disadvantaged?" Sakura protested, pulling me from my reflections. "Naruto's the worst in the class!"

I saw Iruka hesitate, but only because I was looking for it and Naruto, predictably, shifted the attention to him when he bristled.

"Hey! What the hell? I'm an  _awesome_  ninja, I- ow!" he rubbed his nose where a ballistic piece of chalk had impacted with it. "Iruka-sensei," he said, betrayed.

Iruka came around his desk, standing with his hands on his hips. It was a pose he used in class, a sort of stare-them-down-assert-your-dominance stance intended to cow a classroom of small, rowdy ninja - which, frankly:  _good luck, sensei_.

It was true that any team with Naruto on it was almost absurdly overpowered in terms of straight up, you know,  _power_. It wasn't as though he could tell us that, though. "Your team has skills and abilities that work well together in their own way, and not every skill is measured by the Academy's curriculum."

Sakura shot a dubious look at Naruto - one which he missed entirely - but in the end she just clicked her tongue and returned to waiting in silence.

We waited another hour and Iruka finished his marking and began to look seriously annoyed.

"Is he even coming?" Naruto complained. It wasn't the first time.

"Be  _quiet_ ," Sakura snapped, looking quite as though every second thatNaruto kept talking was actual agony for her. Then, a second later: You don't  _know_  that it's a 'he' anyway," she added. "It could be a woman."

I opened my mouth to say that our teacher could be both or neither of those things and then... no. Too hard. I thought better of it. "Statistically, it's more likely to be a man," I said instead.

Sakura turned a betrayed gaze upon me. I ignored it - it was true, anyway. Even in the Academy ninja were so much more likely to be male; I didn't think that would get more equal as they moved up in ranks.

Besides, considering how long we'd been waiting? Yeah. I was pretty sure our teacher was still Kakashi.

Iruka left before we'd seen any sign of our teacher and I found myself thinking fondly of Suzume-sensei's hard-line stance on punctuality.  _She'd_  give us a dangerous, narrow smile and warn us that a ninja who arrives late leaves in pieces.

On the other hand, there wasn't much chance the anybody could really enforce Kakashi showing up on time to anything - what were they doing to do to him, anyway? He was stronger than most of the ninja in the village and from what I knew he was rarely late in the field.

I debated, for all of a second, just going home. 'Sorry,' I'd say, raising my eyebrows, passive aggressive and unrepentant, 'my teacher didn't show up so I assumed he'd been called away for something important.' There was every chance I'd get away with that - I was the last of my clan and with that came some serious leeway. The consequences for Naruto and Sakura were kind of less certain, though. Even as I thought about it, I knew I wouldn't.

There was no point sitting around doing nothing, though, and Naruto looked like he was about to explode into a ball of sullen resentment. I grabbed some blank paperfrom Iruka's abandoned desk.

"Here," I said, kicking a chair over toward the desk where Naruto sat. "Come on, Sakura," I added. "I've got a training game."

Curious, and no doubt also bored out of their minds, there wasn't much resistance to the idea. We ended up crowded around one table in a little circle with a sheet of paper in the middle.

"Basically, you pass the paper around using chakra." I picked it up with a hand and passed it to Sakura, who took it from me with incredible ease. I'd been really  _really_  working on my chakra control, because I needed it to be really good to use even the most basic of ninjutsu, and she outclassed me without even trying.

I frowned at her. I'd have had no problems at all with ninjutsu if I'd had her control, dammit. "You," I said imperiously, "can't use your hands. Your chakra control's too good."

Sakura looked unsure for a second - probably because of my expression, I thought - and then she flushed furiously and smiled at the compliment to her skills. "Yours is really good too," she simpered immediately after, reminding me of exactly why I'd been avoiding her like the plague for several years now.

Naruto rolled his eyes and pulled an exaggerated and ugly kissy face.

I had no idea how to respond to Sakura in a way that wouldn't be either too rude or somehow encouraging. So I just looked at her with my flattest expression until the silence got really awkward.

"Hurry up," said Naruto, shoving his shoulder into mine, "I wanna try."

Sakura scoffed, but she gamely slapped the paper against her elbow and held it out toward Naruto. Squinting, he pressed the palm of his hand to it.

A second later I could actually see the chakra he was losing as he struggled to complete the exercise. It spilled out in a hazy, diffuse kind of halo around his hand and the paper trembled and twitched madly against Sakura's elbow. She looked a little disturbed - and then, after a few more seconds of watching Naruto's chakra go crazy, she looked frustrated.

"Can I let go yet?" she groused, even though she must have known he didn't have it yet.

"Shut up, I'm almost there," Naruto growled right back.

Sakura made a disgusted noise in her throat but she kept her elbow shoved awkwardly out.

Finally, Naruto carefully drew the paper away, holding it carefully with his chakra. His tongue was stuck between his teeth as he turned toward me and he held the page out like it was some sacred relic being passed on to a new guardian.

The corner of my mouth curled at the comparison and I reached forward. "Good," I said, because it seemed like it was a good time to be encouraging. I ignored Sakura's dismissive noise.

Before I could reach the paper there was an unpleasant tearing noise. The paper tore - or shredded, maybe, peeled raggedly away from itself in a hundred tiny pieces - with a surprising BANG and the ugly smell of burning atmosphere.

"Aw, man," Naruto muttered, dismayed.

"Sasuke-kun, if we hurry we might be able to petition them for a new team mate," Sakura said in a honeyed voice.

"You could always just quit," suggested a voice from the doorway.

Kakashi was rude.

And kind of an asshole.

"What?" Naruto snarled. Sakura, too, jerked her head up to glower around at him.

I glanced at him and - and I nearly did a double-take. Kakashi's face was mostly covered, but I could still see skin, an eye, the line of his nose and jaw, a strip of skin between his mask and his collar, and -

It struck me all of a sudden that Kakashi was  _younger than me._

I was well aware that Naruto and Sakura and so many of the others were younger than I was, obviously. But for all my adjustment to this weird whacky universe, I'd thought of canon Kakashi as an adult. I'd never really let go of it.

Actually seeing him...

A hundred facts about his backstory came to me, quietly sneaking into my head while I peered at him leaning in the doorway. He was... he was a  _baby_. Well, no. Not really a baby. But he was young - too young for his experiences, that was for sure.

I was older than him and I barely had the wherewithal to take care of _myself._

In light of the realisation, it was actually a lot easier to muster patience for Kakashi. "If it's all the same to you," I said, as evenly as possible, "I'd rather not."

"Aa. We'll do this the other way, then." He straightened from his slouch in the doorway. "You can meet me on the roof."

And then he was gone.

Naruto swore and raced off after him. He was out of sight almost immediately but I could hear his footsteps clattering on the stairs.

Sakura hesitated. Then: "Come on," she said, sounding deeply uncertain, and preceeded me through the classroom door and up to the roof.

When we got up there, Kakashi went through exactly the spiel I'd expected: He was Hatake Kakashi, he didn't want to tell us his likes or dislikes and he had few hobbies. Tremendously informative, of course.

When asked about her likes, dreams and, terrifyingly,  _hobbies_ , Sakura baldly looked at me and, you know,  _giggled._

I looked sideways at her. How the hell was I her  _hobby_? I swallowed thickly and shifted a little further away from her. I... Every time I started to think Sakura wasn't  _that_  bad, she'd remind me.

She was terrifying.

In my abject horror I realised I'd missed some of the ensuing discussion.

"- Iruka-sensei sometimes buys me ramen at Ichiraku and sometimes  _Sasuke_  does as well but he gets all weird about  _vegetables_  and I  _hate_  the three minutes you have to wait before instant ramen's cooked properly and my hobby is eating different types of ramen and comparing them-"

The noise of Naruto's self-introduction washed over me. He seemed to make it all in one long run-on sentence, too excited to be more coherent about it, but I did catch that somehow  _I_  had some to feature in his favourite things.

I wasn't sure how to feel about that. I... I didn't exactly  _like_  Naruto - but from the perspective of a child to whom everybody was awful, my relative politeness and uncommitted but friendly overtures must have seemed much kinder than they were.

I felt a really unpleasant swell of guilt in my guts. I didn't  _want_  to feel responsible for Naruto's happiness, but if I was his only friend, it... I clenched and unclenched my fists nervously.

Naruto finished explaining his grand plan to become the Hokage so people would acknowledge him, and then it was my turn.

"I..." what had Sasuke said in canon? Something about hating most things and killing Itachi? I frowned. I wasn't Sasuke, as it happened - well, mostly - so there was no point in regurgitating his sentiments. I didn't even really want to kill Itachi - I'd take the opportunity of putting the poor bastard out of his misery if it ever arose, but it wasn't an ambition.

What did I, personally, dislike? "I dislike... crowds. Loud noises. Yelling," I said slowly, "and feeling like I'm putting work into things without achieving anything. I like..." this was harder, unfortunately, "watching lightning storms and meeting friendly cats. My hobby is cooking."

"Huh," said Kakashi. Then, "Dreams and goals?"

"I..." 'Keep away from Orochimaru' was a perfectly reasonable goal, but it would certainly sound pretty damn weird. I bit my bottom lip. "I want to improve my ninjutsu skills?" I said lamely.

Everybody already knew I wanted to improve my ninjutsu skills because I was fucking pants at them. It was kind of a cop-out as an answer, but since Sakura's goal had been to _glance sideways at me and giggle_ , I figured Kakashi didn't really care much.

"Right, well-"

"Ne, Kakashi-sensei," I said, feeling the title 'sensei' sitting weirdly on my tongue. It seemed strange. I couldn't read Kakashi's expression well enough to tell if he thought it was strange, but he did stop talking.

"Mm?"

"Maybe you could tell us  _one_  thing you like. A favourite food or something."

"Yeah, it's not really fair otherwise, is it?" Sakura chimed in.

Naruto wrinkled his nose as though he didn't actually give much of a damn, but after a second, he squinted his eyes shut and nodded seriously.

"Saa..." Kakashi paused. For a second, he stared over our heads. "I like tempura."

I blinked. But that wasn't -

"Anyway," he said, smiling sweetly behind his mask, "Of the twenty-seven graduates of the Academy, only nine will be accepted as genin -"

I scowled at Kakashi, wondering what on  _earth_  his motivation for lying about his favourite food to a bunch of kids was. I couldn't fathom it. The rest of us, although banal and a little obsessive, were hardly dishonest with him. I tapped my fingertips against my knee and glowered.

Blithely, he went on to discuss the details of our 'surprise' survival exercise tomorrow. That was the bell test, I assumed.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to leave a comment. And by 'feel free' I guess I mean 'I encourage you'. You have been encouraged. I pass to you the courage required for commenting. You can do it, friend. Do it for the team.


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